Mark Power made the photographs in Mass during the autumn and winters of 2010 and 2011, working inside more than fifty Catholic church services in Kraków. The project began with a lapsed Catholic’s surprise at the scale of attendance he encountered while working in Poland, and it turned into a sustained study of the Church’s dominance and influence in the country. Rather than photograph the liturgy from the pews, Power negotiated access to the choir loft — the organista position, high at the rear of the church — and looked down and across at the congregation from there. That vantage point shapes the entire book. It is the seat of an official observer, slightly removed, and it lets the assembled faithful be seen as a body rather than as individuals.

The book appeared in 2013 from GOST Books: 118 pages, hardback in foil-stamped real cloth, with Power credited as photographer. The design and the camera position work together. Elevation converts a crowd into pattern, and the sequence accumulates those patterns until the scale of participation becomes the subject itself. Mass is not a survey of church architecture or a travelogue of Polish Catholicism; its interest lies in the recurring problem of photographing collective belief from inside an institution, with an insider’s access and an outsider’s distance held in tension.

For a collector, the significance is in that method rather than in any accident of scarcity. Power, a Magnum photographer, spent two winters on a body of work defined by a single carefully argued constraint, and the resulting book extends the documentary tradition of the constructed viewpoint: a position chosen, negotiated and repeated until it yields meaning. The cloth binding and restrained format suit the seriousness of the undertaking. Mass rewards attention to how each frame varies a fixed situation, and it holds a firm place among Power’s extended projects about place, belief and national life.