MARK POWER

The Sound of Two Songs is the result of Mark Power's ‘love affair’ with Poland.

Power became transfixed whilst making a one-month project for a 2004 Magnum commission, afterwards realising his initial investigations only scraped the surface of a country approximately the same physical size as the other nine new EU members added together. Consequently, he made approximately twenty further visits over the next five years.

The result is a beautiful series of photographs, eloquently describing the changing social values of a country caught between the past, the present and the future, both in terms of attitudes and of the contradictions in its landscape. As Power says, ‘Poland is a beautiful country. Poland is an ugly country.’

The book moves effortlessly between images of the urban and the rural, the old and the new, setting the crumbling inner city housing estates of the communist era against the new developments of colourful apartments and gleaming shopping centres. Power’s project also explores the effect of global capitalism on the Polish landscape with advertising hoardings dominating the cityscape, setting a sharp contrast between the decay and aspiration of the country.

Signed by Mark Power

Edition of 2000