Mark Power spent six years crossing the United States, and Good Morning, America (Volume I) is the published result: 136 pages of photographs in which a country in the midst of change is observed from the outside. The title carries a certain irony, but the book’s subject is not easy ridicule. Power is a British photographer working at a deliberate remove, and that distance — the perspective of a visitor who can never quite belong to the landscape he is describing — shapes everything from his framing of roadside architecture to the way he lets emptiness occupy a picture.

GOST Books issued the volume in 2019 in a clothbound hardback. Power’s concern is not the decisive incident but the ordinary surface of the country: the places where the American physical landscape and the American cultural myth have drifted apart. Photographs of this kind can easily settle into either satire or sentimentality. Power’s sequence holds to neither, allowing the divergence to remain an open question rather than a verdict. The book stands within a longer tradition of photographers from elsewhere turning their attention to the United States, and it is aware of that inheritance without being confined by it.

The word ‘Volume I’ matters. It is presented as the first volume, establishing the terms of the whole: patient looking, an outsider’s discipline, and a refusal to resolve the tension between what America is and what it claims to be.