Black Country Stories

In 2011 we approached Mark Power to invite him to visit the Black Country and to make a new body of work. Mark is known for his complex, meticulously crafted images usually made with large format cameras and of landscapes and places. Each new commission usually begins with several visits to the Black Country for the photographer accompanied by a Multistory member of staff to explore and discover what might interest the photographer to make the process meaningful for them as well as meaningful for a future audience. Quite often an approach might take several months before an idea or story can be explored in more depth.

“Throughout its brief history, photography has maintained a deep fascination with the exotic. From early American pioneers braving the landscapes of the new West, or Victorian travellers on a Grand Tour of Europe - and on through to the pages of the National Geographic - generations of photographers have found inspiration in distant lands. At home they found an audience eager and willing to consume their plunder.

But in today’s image-soaked world, where seemingly everything has been filmed or photographed to saturation point, what is there left to look at?

The key phrase here is the verb ‘to look’. We all take pictures now, but how many of us really look? Really see? As Martin Parr has so astutely pointed out, why are so many photographic clichés - sunsets, cathedrals, flowers - subjects that (almost) never change? Why not, instead, turn our cameras on our high street, the view from the bus we take to work, or the interior of our local shop? In other words, the familiar. These are the pictures that will fascinate future generations… not a sunset.

But this is not as simple as it sounds: it is difficult to really see something we look at every day. And why bother to photograph something that will surely still be there tomorrow, even though we know (of course) that one day it won’t be? The trick, it seems to me, is to retain a sense of wonder about the world around us and to recognise, instead, the extraordinariness; the beauty that surrounds us all”

Mark Power

July, 2012

Partners: The New Art Gallery Walsall, Sandwell College Photography Department

Funders: Arts Council, Sandwell Council