His excursions to the US are periodic but regular, and o en involve visits to places that Power has found some connection to from a film or a book. “Where I go is o en driven by a genuine desire to see a place I think I know from popular culture,” he says. “As an example, a trip last October began in Fargo, because I love the movie of the same name – I saw the original wood-chipper in the local museum! – and ended in Rapid City, South Dakota, near Mount Rushmore, where much of North by Northwest is set – another touchstone for me. It goes without saying that a place never looks as seductive as it does in a movie… It wasn’t even snowing in Fargo, which wasn’t a good start. In many ways, the process I’m going through reminds me of making e Shipping Forecast; invariably, then as now, I’d be surprised by a place simply because it was never the same as the landscapes that existed in my imagination. But that’s the fuel in my tank these days; the more ‘ordinary’ or even ‘boring’ a place is, the more I like it.”
So how does Power work while photographing: does he wander through America alone, for instance? “I sometimes meet up with a young photographer from Nashville – Dean Berner – whom I met in London at a Magnum workshop in 2015,” he reveals. “I asked him then if he’d be interested in travelling with me because, for a start, America is vast and complex, and can be a lonely place. I’m not very gregarious; I don’t make friends easily and I’m certainly not the kind of person who would go into a bar alone and start chatting; I’m too shy for that. So I thought it would be good to have company and it would encourage me to take a few more risks, and that’s proved to be true. In most places we’ll separate and meet up several hours later, but occasionally, if we’re in a place that feels a little tricky, a little dangerous, then we’ll walk within eyeshot of each other. There are many pictures in Volume One that I’m sure I would not have made had I been alone.
“If Dean is with me, I sit in the passenger seat. The monotony of the American landscape can easily lull me into a half-sleep and I find I can’t concentrate for hours at a time, staring at things flashing past a car window. Occasionally I might ask him to make a U-turn, but ultimately that rarely makes a picture. Whatever I’ve seen invariably ‘shouts’ a little too much, it’s very obvious, and probably a little too ‘Americana’ for my tastes. Instead I prefer to walk, following long, ambling routes through town after town after town. Pictures collected on foot are naturally more subtle, and tend to interest me for longer. This is exactly why I prefer not to use the term ‘road trips’, because that’s not really what I’m doing. I prefer to say I’m making a series of urban hikes.” In turn, Berner, an MFA student, has written about Power as a teacher, in terms which are also revealing about his approach to such a big subject: “Mark Power told us that photography can be a lot like fishing, where you have to find the right spot to cast, and then it becomes about patience and perseverance.”
Good Morning, America has been underway for over six years
at present and is a huge enterprise, but Power has shown time and again that such major undertakings are within his scope. “I’ve always thought the easiest part is collecting pictures. Much more difficult is knowing what I want to do with them, what I want to say about my experience, about what I’ve seen, about what I think,” he says.