FASHION

The majority of the images were made while on commission. Some are of recognisable architectural landmarks while others are more obscure. Some focus on tiny, often overlooked details while others demonstrate Power’s skill at capturing the monumental. Collectively they reveal an ongoing practice where every photograph is meticulously composed and considered. Importantly, the images in the book are devoid of captions, descriptions or dates. As a result they are sequenced neither by location nor chronologically but solely by use of visual links of colour, form and light. A gentle humour is often revealed in the details—a hole in a shoe, rows of white gloves hung out to dry or a painstakingly arranged cupboard of brooms and brushes. Removed from their original commercial or industrial context they become elusive and poetic. 

Power began looking at his archive of construction pictures in this way during a Magnum Photos Live Lab at The House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon in 2018, when he worked collaboratively to attempt to sequence around 200 photographs. Influenced then and now by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s landmark book Evidence (1977), Power’s project has grown and evolved over the following seven years to this published form. 

The earliest photographs in the book were made during the construction of the Millennium Dome (1997-2000), documented by Power in over one hundred site visits. This work returned to the 19th century tradition of a singular photographer documenting the construction of great public building from start to finish. However, before he took a single picture he carefully negotiated the freedom to make his own work on the site, rather than be told what to photograph, or how. Ever since, his work has followed this same formula. Fashion is, in part, a celebration of what is possible within the commercial world if there is trust on both sides and the photographer is given artistic licence and liberty.

FASHION [fash-uhn] v., transitive. (a) To make or construct (something) out of constituent parts; to put together. (b) To form, mould, or shape (something or someone); to make or create (something) by a process of shaping or moulding. (c) To give (something) a shape or form appropriate to or suitable for something; to adjust or adapt to a purpose, a situation, an outcome, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary).