About the talk:

Mark is a Magnum photographer and educator whose work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the world. His current project documents the Black Country, an area of the UK that has been 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.

Recorded during: TEDxKraków 2012

About the speaker:

Though Mark studied and originally practised illustration, he "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.

Mark 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 Schindler factory in May 2007.

Want to get to know Mark Power? Explore his website and his photography.