You might feel you have seen the woman sweeping the gutter in Mark Power’s 2018 photograph somewhere before. Her careful, stooped attitude, the improvised plastic aprons over the puffer jacket and the Dutch-looking point to her hood might all have stepped out of Vermeer’s The Little Street, painted in the 1650s. The brick facades of the row of houses in Baltimore, Maryland, picked out by Power’s large format camera, also gesture towards that Delft hyper-realism – and the implied social questions in the image echo across centuries and continents.
Like the Dutch painter, Power invites you to look hard at each brick, window and railing in his frame. The five houses here, in this precise light, start to take on troubled lives of their own – suspects in an identity parade of urban decline. The poster bottom right advertises the promise of “Total Rehabs”. The mattress at the window, the improvised door frames tell different stories.
Power’s photographs of America often work slowly on the viewer in this way. This picture comes from the fourth volume of the British photographer’s ongoing project Good Morning, America, which began with Barack Obama’s second term in 2012 and has taken in the existential uncertainties of the Trump years. His method seems in the tradition of the “survey” photographic quests that depicted the American landscape in pioneering prospectuses for railroads and westerly migration in the mid-19th century, but in many ways his photographs offer a before and after to those vistas: the scale and grandeur remain but those ambitions are undone in the detail of how things have worked out. Walking through left-behind districts such as this one or getting a vantage on rust-belt factories and drive-throughs and housing projects, his pictures give a constant feel of time arrested; and of the need for proper attention, in every sense.
Good Morning, America (Volume IV) is published by Gost (£50)
