The title of Mark Power’s new book is a verb before it is a genre. FASHION gathers photographs made over twenty-seven years and across twenty-three countries, at construction sites, factories, quarries, shipyards, foundries, recycling plants, and theatres—places where things are made, moulded, or shaped. Many of the images were made on commission; some record recognisable landmarks, others small, easily overlooked details. Power’s point is the work itself: in each frame the act of making is carefully composed, and the photographs ask to be read on those terms.
The book’s method is its argument. There are no captions, descriptions, or dates. Nothing is ordered by place or chronology; the sequence proceeds by visual links of colour, form, and light. Torn from their commercial or industrial briefs, the pictures become elusive and quietly funny—a hole in a shoe, rows of white gloves drying, a cupboard of brooms arranged with care. Power began sequencing this material from his archive during a Magnum Photos Live Lab in Lisbon in 2018, working collaboratively with around 200 photographs, and the project grew over the following seven years into the present volume. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence (1977) is an acknowledged influence.
The earliest pictures come from the Millennium Dome construction, which Power documented in more than a hundred site visits between 1997 and 2000—a return to the nineteenth-century practice of one photographer following a great public building from start to finish. Before taking a single frame there, he negotiated the freedom to make his own work rather than be directed. That arrangement has governed his commissioned work since, and FASHION is partly a celebration of what trust and artistic licence can produce inside commercial constraints.
GOST Books publishes the book in hardback at 285 x 199 mm: 520 pages and 287 images, weighing nearly three kilograms. It has been announced as the winner of the PHotoESPAÑA 2026 award for Best Photography Book of the Year in the Creative category. The interest lies in the coherence of the whole: a long-running body of commissioned work re-edited into a single sequence, with the apparatus of assignment stripped away, leaving colour, form, and light to carry the meaning.
