Mark Power Blog

Dropping into the Salt Mine, I was rather surprised to see the last entry was written last Summer …and now suddenly it’s the first week of the new decade and somehow Fall slipped away, and we’re surrounded by canyons of snow…

Truth to tell after an extended bout of work in which I completed two new books I found myself the victim of blogblock, an unpleasant sounding condition which simply means I have nothing really to say, and even if I do, I seem to lack the will to say it.

A common condition of writers and I suspect a condition common to anyone after a difficult or protracted period of work. The vessel is empty; the battery discharged: pick your own metaphor to describe  a rather pleasant emptiness in which time doesn’t pass, it drifts, as if the sofa you are on is a boat being carried towards some unknown destination. It’s not unlike watching television: people undergoing improbable lives briefly flicker into existence but when you’re asked what you were watching you have no memory of watching anything.

Not a bad state to be in at Christmas, a time filled with distracting trivia, not a time to embark upon tasks of any significance even if you felt so inclined. So instead you hug all your loved ones and give them tokens of your affection and drink on the nights you’re supposed to drink and suddenly you’re lifting your glass to salute another year and another decade and another January week of bone-chilling cold and tree-toppling winds.

Winter sky, Maryland

So here I am reminding my readers that I haven’t forgotten you and sooner or later the old urge will return and my ruminations will once again fill these pages … or not, in which case this blog, like many others, will quietly descend in ever-decreasing circles into a large hole of forgetfulness.

BOOKS:

But before possibly journeying into that unknown, I want to note that I’ve moved my books from the blog posts to the PAGES section to the right of this page. There under “Books by Mark L. Power” ” you’ll find the newest books, The Dinner Party and SATX82, and all its predecessors too.

The Dinner Party is another experiment with a fictional text and images. In this short narrative a group of friends at a dinner party realize that one time or another they have all lived in the country. As the friends relate their rural experiences during the meal I illustrate their recollections with black-and-white photographs of animals.

A sample page from The Dinner Party

right click then “view image’ to enlarge

SATX82 is a collection of color photographs made in and around San Antonio Texas in 1982. There is a back story to this collection which is outlined in the BOOKS page. Here’s a page spread from SATX82:

The picture on the left was a San Antonio fixture, a haberdashery where many a young Texas lad donned his first pair of long pants in order to  confront the future.  Now the Pincus emporium is gone as is the man on the right, the celebrated San Antonio photographer, E. O. Goldbeck.

Goldbeck, famed for his group shots of military outfits and equally remarkable panoramic photographs made with the Cirkut camera, died in 1986. The Cirkut camera was an extraordinary piece of machinery with a rotating lens and film that measured  eight inches by five feet. Goldbeck was the undoubted maestro of the Cirkut and he had even devised a way to make enlargements of the unwieldy five foot long negative.

E.O. Goldbeck counting the day’s proceeds, 1982

Goldbeck at work, probably a self-portrait. ca. 1940s

Goldbeck reminded me of O. Winston Link in that he seemed more proud of his technical accomplishments than  his images. In Link’s case it was innovative ways of flash-lighting speeding trains at night; with Goldbeck it was ingeniously designing group photographs with no less than twenty thousand soldiers upon occasion ( to get that kind of crowd in his pictures Andreas Gursky has to resort to a computer!) as well as inventing an enlarger for the Cirkut camera. Both men tended to dismiss the art in their work, preferring to think of themselves as jobbing photographers which of course they were, but the fact remains that both produced work of exceptional authenticity and beauty that went well beyond the limitations of most commercial photography.

“American Flyers”

right click then “view image’ to enlarge

One suspects Goldbeck might have dismissed this panoram — after all, it didn’t involve thousands of men and probably only took a few hours to plan instead of days. Nevertheless, as well as any of his more famous images, it reveals his singular eye. The delicacy of space, the subtlety of figures to ground, the symmetry which is actually asymmetric  and add to that,  the rueful tug of time past– masterful.

Another photographer in SATX82 is the man above, Clarence John Laughlin, not of San Antonio, but rather the pride of New Orleans. Clarence knew he was an artist, and he would tell you so at the slightest opportunity, although not without a twinkle in his eye. But unlike most blowhards, he was a real artist, an old time surrealist who remained faithful to his muse through times good and bad. From the Laughlin image below you might get the impression his muse liked to frequent ante-bellum mansions and you’d be right. Laughlin took many of his most telling images in those beautiful decaying palaces.

Farewell to the Past, 1946

When I made the portrait in SATX82 some three years before his death in 1985, Laughlin gave me a tour of his extensive library consisting of some thirty thousand volumes, housed in a cinderblock building behind his suburban bungalow in Metairie.  Ever the contrarian, Laughlin seemed most proud of his collection of books on black magic and witchcraft, and his library is now  at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

One of Laughlin’s books, Ghosts along the Mississippi, must have had one of the largest press runs in history as I’d see copies of this book almost every time I found myself in a second hand bookstore. I have two copies and I’ve given away one or two. But no longer – booksellers have belatedly realized the value of photography books.