It may not seem like it yet, but the 2012 edition of TEDxKraków is quickly approaching. That means we are narrowing down our speaker choices (made all the more exciting thanks to our “Put your lecturers in their place” campaign) and have our first speaker announcements coming up. That’s right – a revival of our “Introducing the Speakers” series to, well, introduce our speakers!
The first speaker officially announced for TEDxKraków 2012 is British photographer and educator Mark Power. Though he studied and originally practised illustration, Power “accidentally” became a photographer in 1983, and a teacher of the art in 1992. Since that time he has held several exhibitions around the world, won numerous awards, including the Terence Donovan Award for British Photography in 2001, and been featured in collections across the UK, USA and Europe. He has been a part of international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos since 2002, becoming a full member in 2007. In addition to his impressive photography career, he has been a professor of photography at the University of Brighton, UK since 2004.
“Krakow”, 2009, from the The Sound of Two Songs project.
Power has five publications to his name: The Shipping Forecast (1996), Superstructure (2000), The Treasury Project (2002), 26 Different Endings (2007), and The Sound of Two Songs (2010), which is most likely to interest our TEDx’ers, as it chronicles his five-year project set in contemporary Poland. In fact, Power is no stranger to Poland and especially Kraków. He lived here for six months from August 2010 until February 2011, and curated an exhibition at the in the Oskar Schindler factory in May 2007.
In 2011, Mark Power was commissioned to produce a series of urban landscapes in response to his experience of the Black Country, an area hit particularly hard by the economic recession. While first impressions of these photographs might confirm this downturn in fortunes, on further viewing they reveal their ‘secret lives’ of splendour of the forgotten and the everyday, and a quiet yet simmering beauty begins to emerge.
Want to get to know Mark Power? Explore his website and his photography, and stay tuned to the TEDxKraków blog for updates!