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.
