A Sprawling Monument to How Things Get Made
In 1997, Tony Blair’s newly elected Labour government announced plans to build the Millennium Dome on a derelict former wasteland in East London. The British photographer Mark Power, who’d shot the site on a one-day magazine assignment before anyone knew what would become of it, decided that someone like him ought to document the project from start to finish. To persuade the organizers to grant him access, Power appealed to the nineteenth-century tradition in which a designated photographer would chronicle the construction of a great public work. When that failed, he pointed to Darius Kinsey’s images of loggers along the American railroads and Lewis Hine’s photographs of ironworkers atop the unfinished Empire State Building. Whether worn down or inspired, the organizers eventually let Power in.
Now in his sixties, Power has spent decades photographing construction sites on commission. With each client, he has secured the same enviable creative license: to shoot what he wants, how he wants. In lieu of choreographed ribbon cuttings, he gravitates toward stark, formalist studies of nascent structures. His photographs of the Millennium Dome, first published in a stand-alone book at the turn of the century, are the earliest images in his latest collection, “Fashion” (GOST Books), which depicts industrial settings across the world: quarries and mines, steel mills and tanneries, processing plants and recycling facilities. The collection sets out its conceit on page 1, enumerating several definitions of “fashion,” all of them verbs. Power’s interest is not in finished products but in the processes that brought them to be. “Fashion” is itself an imposing, slowly wrought colossus, more than five hundred pages in total and, at around six pounds, so heavy that the publisher warns of a postage surcharge. Power assembled the collection with his editor, Stuart Smith, over seven years, sequencing images not by chronology or geography but by loose, associative principles: color, form, light.
Although the photographs span nearly two dozen countries and three decades, Power provides no captions, scrubbing his scenes of dates and descriptions. (The approach is an homage to “Evidence,” a landmark photo book from the seventies, which culls images from the archives of California engineering firms.) Certain recurring subjects are recognizable: a Eurovision-like arena stage blazing with light; an Airbus rollout ceremony orchestrated with the pomp of a product launch; half-built towers rising into what looks to be the Dubai skyline. Yet many of Power’s shots possess an uncanny anonymity. The palettes are often chalky and austere—bleached grays, oxidized browns—and the subject matter can blur into undifferentiated bulk. The spirit is pointedly globalist: industrialization, it turns out, is everywhere. Pinpointing time or place becomes a guessing game with few reliable clues: the style of an electrical socket, or the scrawl on a rusting junction pipe.
Power brings a warmer and more wayward sensibility to such material than, say, the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose deadpan grids of coal tipples and water towers drained industrial structures of affect. A few shots in “Fashion,” for instance, coax domestic familiarity out of hulking equipment. The tarpaulin draped over a ship propeller brings to mind dirty laundry slung over the blades of an idle fan. A scatter of welding rods on a sandy floor resembles black straws dropped by a barista. Elsewhere, Power catches the wry drama of nature and infrastructure in collision: maple leaves snag in the mesh of a security fence, and bleached trees breach the surface of a man-made reservoir like the desperate fingers of some beast going under. It is the machines that seem most sentient. An Airbus fuselage in mid-assembly, with white tarps strapped across its cockpit windows and nose, looks eerily like one of its would-be passengers, a hypochondriac hoping for a few hours of in-flight shut-eye.
Power’s human subjects are scarce enough to give “Fashion” a post-apocalyptic feel. Heavy-duty gloves, paired up on polished surfaces or drooping from metal racks, tend to stand in for hands. The people who do appear are lone figures clad in all manner of personal protective equipment: hard hats and face visors, bulky coveralls and high-visibility vests, weathered shoes and rubber boots. They skulk through the dark of ship holds or linger in the harsh glare of construction yards. One memorable image treats a worker’s broken arm with the same formal attention as the machinery that may have caused the damage. In Power’s view, what stands out isn’t the limb’s injury but the scaffolding that heals it: a plaster cast suspended, like a concrete beam, by a beige sling.
Power’s deserted worksites could be received as a harbinger of a world without workers, one in which unmanned machines no longer need the humans who helped build them. But “Fashion” is ultimately a monument to the arduous act of making. One image, shot in what appears to be a shipbuilding facility, features another human arm, emerging from the left side of the frame as its gloved fingers clasp a chain that runs off symmetrically to the right. The scene is blurred, as if the limb were in motion, but Power has suspended the gesture into a tense yet amicable handshake between man and machine.
