Mark Power
Mark Power’s project ‘26 Different Endings’ explores the unkept, and isolated looking areas that fall off the edge of the A-Z London Street Atlas.
“The coverage of the map changes with each new edition. Someone somewhere decides, year by year, where it should end; which parts of the periphery of London should be included, and which should not. This project is about the unfortunate places that fall just off the edge.”
The content of the images is banal, un-extraordinarily everyday, things we wouldn’t normally blink an eye at. Yet it is the context that brings the images together and creates a poignant project about the idea of place, both physically and mentally.
These areas have been left out, pushed away from society and not included in one of the most used maps in the UK, falling away into “nothingness” (Photobook, 2021). The series of images showing grey mundane scenes, all in various states of ruin and indistinction, simply exist in a condition of grey-ness and may reflect the condition of life in these places. These places don’t exist on a certain map, yet they still physically exist and they are inhabited by everyday people who call them home.
The work plays on memory, scenes we all recognise or maybe relate to, but in some way have become lost in transition and stuck in a lifeless cycle in which we all try to escape. These images may reflect the past, memories of slowly decaying estates in which we grew up on, still existing in the same way today but with new inhabitants living the same cycle.
When I was first thinking about my borders project, this work by Power quickly came to mind. I briefly studied the work in my first year of university, I became interested with the themes of the mundane and banal because it is interesting how these everyday elements, when put together in new contexts become art. They become thinking points for a bigger picture, and make us question and think further about things we tend to overlook. These scenes photographed by Power, reflect run down, isolated areas and we start to think about the people living there - are they poor, rich? happy? healthy? supported? accepted by society? Sometimes the simplest of images can reflect a lot more than first thought.
The project has inspired me through the use of maps. I have been looking over maps to see literally where the border is in my local areas, and whilst doing this I can pin point exact areas of interest I can visit where the border crosses, where Wales falls into England..
- Photo-eye Bookstore (2021) 26 Different Endings by Mark Power . Available at: https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=zd324&i=&i2= (Accessed: 22 February 2021).
- Photoworks (2021). 26 Different Endings Mark Power . Available at: https://photoworks.org.uk/shop/26-different-endings-mark-power/ (Accessed: 22 February 2021).
- Power, M. (2021). 26 DIFFERENT ENDINGS. Available at: https://www.markpower.co.uk/projects/26-different-endings (Accessed: 22 February 2021).