Can you tell us a little about your working process? I don’t take thousands of pictures. It’s very much about having a relationship with the subject while I’m standing in front of it, freezing a moment in time which is never going to be the same again. It’s a kind of memento mori, I suppose. People think of shipyards as stark, gritty places. How did you approach finding beauty in this environment? It’s an old adage, but there’s beauty to be found everywhere. You only have to look. Over the past 25 years, I’ve done a lot of work in construction sites, including shipyards, and I don’t find them stark or gritty at all. I love the contrast between enormous industrial spaces and intimate, tiny corners – between big objects and small ones. I also enjoy the accidental sculptures that are created by the workers, made without any artistic intent but which are often astonishingly beautiful. A good example of this would be the blue canvas that I found tossed over the ship’s propeller, which couldn’t have been done more aesthetically if they’d tried. And the point is, they hadn’t tried at all… it was only there to perform a function. Photography is a powerful medium for storytelling.What stories or messages do you hope Metamorphosis conveys to your audience? I’ve never seen myself as a “storyteller.” I’m more interested in making individual pictures that contain many layers of detail and information to suggest a number of issues. I try to imagine myself as an alien, looking at the pictures for the first time and finding interest in everything equally. In other words, everything within the image is of equal importance, and I’m not telling the viewer exactly what to look at. How did you attempt to capture the scale of Crystal Symphony? You’re very aware of the size of ships when you stand close to them because you rarely see a ship like this out of water. They are enormous; everything is on a gargantuan scale. Sometimes – often – a photograph struggles to convey scale accurately. So where possible, in Trieste, I used people to give a sense of scale. ZH ZH ZH ZH MP MP MP MP Do you still use a large-format film camera, or do you prefer digital media? I used a large-format film camera (5” x 4” negatives) for more than 20 years but made the switch to digital in 2013. I managed to find a digital version of my technical camera, with the same movements I was used to. It meant that I was able to make the same kind of pictures digitally as I used to make on film. This was important to me because I had developed a way of looking, and of making pictures, that I didn’t want to lose. All photographers are in search of their individual voice, something that – if you find it – makes your photographs instantly recognizable. I like to think that after all these years, I have managed to find my own voice. What’s your next big project? I’m currently putting together a book that uses pictures from the many, many diªerent industrial/manufacturing sites I’ve had the pleasure to photograph over the years. I’ve mixed them up, and there are no captions, so we’re never sure where we are or what we’re looking at. I’m trying to make the point that it’s possible to make powerful, beautiful, eloquent, and deeply personal work within the corporate sector. I want it to be a celebration of the possibilities to make good work when trust exists between the company and myself. Crystal gave me complete freedom to photograph whatever I wanted on board their ships. I was never told what to do, and I was very grateful for that. Were you surprised to be invited to photograph a ship mid-restoration? I was really pleased that I was being encouraged to photograph this process. Normally all you would see is the finished article, in all its glory. But it was recognized that there’s a real beauty in this act of change. There’s a strange beauty to these images, a kind of splendor to them that harks back, perhaps, to the way travel used to be. A limited edition of Mark Power’s images of Crystal Symphony are available to buy from Magnum Photos, priced at £3,000 for a 20" x 26.5" image on 24" × 30.5" paper (edition of eight, plus two artist’s proofs), and £5,000 for a 32" x 42.5" image on 40" × 50.5" paper (edition of four, plus two artist’s proofs). Prints are oªered as archival pigment prints, signed by the artist on the verso. Please contact londongallery@magnumphotos.com for more information. ZH ZH ZH MP MP MP CRYSTAL THROUGH THE EYES OF… CALL OR VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR PRICING, ITINERARIES, AND MORE 24
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