Mark Power Gdańsk 11/2004
£110.00
64 in stock
C-type digital print on Fujicolor gloss paper
From an edition of 100 Stamped, numbered and signed on the reverse
Image size: 14 x 11 inches
Paper size: 16 x 13 inches
Unframed
£110 +p&p (Photoworks Friends £88 +p&p)
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About this work:
In 2004, at the start of a five-year project in Poland documented in the acclaimed Photoworks publication, The Sound of Two Songs, Mark Power visited the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. The site of the 1980 Solidarity strikes had enormous significance to Mark who as a student, had campaigned in the UK in support of the striking Polish ship workers.
Power explains,
“The strikes in the shipyard, which were quickly quelled by the imposition of martial law and a heavy military presence, played an important role in the domino effect that caused the Berlin Wall to fall just nine years later. When I started the project one of the first places I wanted to visit was that very shipyard. Access was, at least in those days, simpler than you might imagine and I spent two extraordinary days inside, bathed in the most beautiful, flat, slightly misty November light.
This picture was made at the culmination of that visit. I remember feeling a little sad as I viewed the shipyard from the other side of the river, because the reality of what I’d found inside was quite different from what I’d expected. The facts were plain and simple: the striking workers won their battle, yet discovered that in the cold light of the capitalist dawn, and in an open market, they couldn’t compete with the Chinese, or the Koreans, or even the Swedes when it came to building ships. In short, most lost their jobs. By 2004 the shipyard was running at less than 15% capacity.
This picture wasn’t included in the final edit for The Sound of Two Songs simply because I had too many other shipyard pictures I liked and couldn’t include them all. But were I to make a new sequence today, I think I would use it. With the passing of just a little more time, it seems more poignant.”
About Mark Power:
Mark Power (b. 1959) is a British photographer. His work has been seen in numerous solo and group exhibitions, at venues including the National Media Museum in Bradford, the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He is Professor of Photography at the University of Brighton, and joined Magnum Photos in 2002. Mark is a former Photoworks Trustee. Publications: The Shipping Forecast (Zelda Cheatle Press 1997), Superstructure (Harper Collins 2000), The Treasury Project (Photoworks, 2002), 26 Different Endings (Photoworks, 2007), The Sound of Two Songs (Photoworks, 2010) and MASS (GOST, 2013).
This edition is beautifully printed by LabLab in Kraków, Poland under Power’s supervision.
Please note that postage before the end of the year is no longer a possibility. All orders will be shipped after 4 January 2022.
