Good Morning, America: Volume V

GOST Books are pleased to announce the publication of the fifth and final book in Mark Power’s seminal series about the United States completing an ambitious body of work which began 14 years ago, days before Obama was elected for another term.

The work continued through Trump’s first tenure, then Biden’s, before ending halfway through Trump’s second period in office, and all set against a backdrop of social division, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and wars the US waged in foreign lands. This book, like its predecessors, draws on photographs made throughout the entire project, although the majority were taken since the publication of Volume IV in 2024. 

Power doesn’t document specific political events or power-shifts literally. Instead, he explores the complex visual narrative of the country’s cultural and physical landscape, referring to the headlines indirectly, hinting at events rather than stating them candidly. The resulting photographs are quiet yet darkly foreboding, weaving in and out of a variety of subjects, and consistently suggesting that all is not quite as it seems. 

Good Morning, America was initially driven by memories born from a childhood watching American TV, which made its way across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. The final image in Volume V, which circles back to the opening spread of Volume I, suggests that the America Power had been searching for all along was never really there at all.

Unlike any of the previous books, Volume V also contains two specially commissioned texts: an essay by Brad Zellar and a poem by Andrew Zawacki.