The thing that has stuck with me most about this book though isn’t the photographs, but a paragraph from the photographer’s introduction:

“many years ago while at a friend’s house, I was watching a film on television called Scott of the Antarctic. Outside, a fierce snowstorm raged. The TV set was positioned close to a window, which created an uncanny relationship between the snowy TV screen and the actual snow pelting the windowpane. In the movie, Scott and his crew trudged blindly through a blizzard to their demise. After the film, I left the apartment and headed home. To my surprise, all public transportation was halted because of the storm. I had to walk home five miles through an onslaught of sleet and snow. When I finally arrived, my feet were nearly frozen. Today, the blurring between the urban landscape and the mediascape increasingly typifies our world.”

As I read this paragraph, I was treated to an extremely vivid flashback from one of my first travelling experiences from 2000 – a surreal two days in Hong Kong.

Late in the evening on September 10th, 2000, I touched down into Hong Kong airport, my gateway to a month travelling in China. I passed through the gleaming new terminal, with its polished metal and glass in stark contrast to Heathrow just 15hrs earlier, and boarded an express train to Hong Kong island. It was raining heavily, and through the rain on the windows I could see the lights of residential skyscrapers clinging to the sides of the bays.

Eventually the train entered a long tunnel, and at the subterranean main terminus I changed onto a metro line that took me beneath the straits and into Tsim Sha Tsui. I climbed the stairs from the station to the street into a world of neon and torrential rain, the streets still busy with pedestrians and food stalls. I was instantly reminded of a scene from Bladerunner where Harrison Ford eats noodles from a street side cafe while rain pours down around him.

I didn’t have any accommodation reserved, but I knew that I wanted to stay in either Mirador or Chungking Mansions, both of them huge city blocks populated by tailors, guesthouses and restaurants. They’re well known for having the cheapest accommodation for travellers in Hong Kong.

I checked into a tiny hotel room deep inside Mirador Mansions. There was literally enough room to drop my backpack on the floor, fall onto a single bed, and squeeze past a tiny door into a shower/toilet area. There were no windows, and it was stifling hot. I had to sit on the toilet to use the shower. The whole unit seemed to have been created from a mould, and then stuck together with a few rivets. Somehow, the owners had managed to squeeze a tiny television into the top corner of the room at the end of the bed. I felt really claustrophobic and tired, but at the same time wired with energy from travelling and being in a new, strange environment. I stretched out as much as I could on the tiny bed, and switched on the TV.

I had to do a double take – without even changing channel, I realised I was watching the very scene from Bladerunner that I had thought about just 15 minutes previously as I stepped out of the tube station. For a few seconds I was perturbed and bewildered – for at that moment my life seemed to be mimicking a movie.

8 years later and the whole experience is still there in my memory in total clarity. Joel Meyerowitz (in “Creating a Sense Of Place“) wrote about how each time he pressed the shutter for a photograph, a lifetime’s worth of experience is imbued into the making of that image. For me, the “Hong Kong Bladerunner Experience” is a memory that flashes back regularly when I think about photographing, although I have never been able to put my finger on why that’s the case. I don’t think that this specific experience has had a profound influence on the way that I photograph, but I find it interesting how certain experiences and memories retain their clarity and take on a significance above and beyond the myriad of encounters and occurences that we experience through our lives.

Do you have a specific memory that stands out above and beyond others? Have you ever seen the boundaries between the real world and a fictional world become blurred?

USA. California. 1968. California Grape Strike. Cesar Chavez. © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

It is a protest photo from a workers strike in California from the late 60′s. In itself it isn’t a particularly remarkable photograph; however what gave it resonance for me was a sense of time and place; I can feel the photographers presence – the fact that Fusco was there at all lends weight to the purpose of this demonstration.

It made me think – in 40 years time, will similar images from this generation come to hold the same weight and gravitas as Fusco’s? My gut instinct is “no”. When I think back over protest photography from the last 20 years, the only picture that instantly springs to mind is that of “Tank Man” from the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

Beijing, June 5, 1989, by Jeff Widener (The Associated Press).

After a couple more minutes of thinking, this 9/11 image by Thomas Hoepker drifted in from my memory banks as well:

Young people on the Brooklyn waterfront on Sept. 11 2001, ©Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

That’s two photographs from the last twenty years. I wasn’t alive in the 60′s, but I have this romantic idea in my head of photojournalists of that era being brave men and women who were driven by a passion for truth and a desire to show the world the political issues of the time. While these ideals may not have changed, perhaps it is the sheer number of practising photographers and the rapidity with which images get distributed and shared that has served to dilute the waters; While there are plenty of fantastic working photojournalists out there, it seems to me like the time when one photographer could make an era defining photograph of a single event are gone. When I look back to the biggest event so far in London this year, the May Day Protests, there isn’t one particular image that stands out. All I can remember is a deluge of photographs, several of which seemed to include more photographers than protestors….

May Day Demonstration, 1st May 2009, London. (Photographer unknown)

I’d be interested to see some conversation about this. Maybe I just have a brain like a sieve, and there are others out there who can think of dozens of iconic images from the last twenty years of photojournalism. I’d like to think this is quite specific aswell – I can think about many iconic photographs from a “non-news” context – I just feel that news photography and the coverage of big events are so swamped by the sheer volume of imagery, that the chances of one particular photograph becoming iconic have diminished.

What stands out as your iconic news photograph of the last twenty years?

Are you a photojournalist? How do you feel about the current state of news photography?

“This is all found imagery, I’m not consciously referencing anything.” (via Shoot the Blog)

“Though my images are minimal in tone, they do not pare down my experience of place. In my work there is scope for so much more. What seem like highly controlled and manipulated photographs are but a product of illusion. The illusion of the photographic process. This is especially evident in “The Accidental Theorist” series. Most people assume that these image are manipulated. Or perhaps even staged. In reality, there is no post-production work, no darkroom or computer manipulation.” (via The Morning News)

I discussed Martins’ photography with other photography friends – specifically when we saw his work at the Photographers Gallery in London in 2006; we couldn’t work out how he had photographed the beach scenes in “Topologies”; However I was prepared to take Martins’ claims of authenticity at face value.

Martins spent the autumn of 2008 on commission for the New York Times making work on the real estate collapse in the United States. When I saw the slide-show (which has now been removed) on the NY Times website, something felt a little bit wrong. I’ve been making work in a similar vein to this in Spain since 2007. “The Brick Business”, which I am now continuing thanks to funding from the BJP and Nikon, is a study of the effects of the economic crisis on Spain’s residential landscape. I’ve made several trips out to Spain’s Mediterranean coast, with many days spent wandering through desolate housing estates, half finished construction sites and downtrodden suburbs. With this experience in mind, what disturbed me about Martins’ images was that they were just too perfect – when did you last see a half built house with almost perfectly clean floors?

So when the essay (titled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age”) was pulled from the NY Times website, I was dismayed but not completely surprised.

In a bizarre follow up to the removal, Martins has since collaborated with Joerg Colberg and composed a response to the accusations of image manipulation. I have to be honest and say that it’s perhaps the most overbearingly pretentious artists statement I have ever had the misfortune to read, and it completely fails to answer the issue at hand – why did he lie about using digital manipulation in his work?

It’s a shame really – if Martins had been open about his methodology from day one (or simply not boasted that he didn’t need to digitally manipulate his photographs) then I would still like his work, which is obviously beautiful; but why would he openly lie to his audience? It was inevitable that one day he would get found out. As a viewer and previously an admirer, I can’t help but feel cheated.

Finally, now that Martins has been exposed as a liar, why would he then continue to treat us like idiots by offering a load of pompous drivel instead of a frank and honest explanation? I find the whole sequence of events baffling, particularly as it could have been so easily avoided.

Edgar – some advice – find someone else to handle your PR.

In the meantime, here’s a reminder from Raoul of just how complicated video can be: outtakes from his Print on Demand review Lucky he’s French…. and remember, the camera is scary!

by Jessica via Facebook

by Wayne Pyle via Facebook

What continues to amaze me is the power of photography and the internet to inspire the public imagination. It’s easy to dismiss these internet phenomenons as fads or a temporary craze; however I find the sheer velocity of these internet movements to be quite incredible – from a Facebook group that was started sometime around the middle of June to the pages of several national newspapers in around three weeks!

by Wayne Pyle via Facebook

by Wayne Pyle via Facebook

For me the beauty of the “Lying Down” group is its apparent lack of motive. There is no intention to make art as such, yet driven by competitiveness and a sense of humour, the imagination of the contributors is forced to be increasingly inventive.

by Lynda Armstrong via Facebook

by Philip Barton via Facebook

by Christina Cowley via Facebook

by Linzi Whatnell via Facebook

Perhaps the reason why I was drawn to these images also had something to do with the naive appropriation of a commonly used motif within photography: the prostrate stranger, photographed unaware – examples of which have been featured recently here on insig.ht:

by Tod Papageorge

by Mark Powell

A motif that has also been covered by insig.ht contributors:

by Hin Chua

by Michael David Murphy

by Raoul Gatepin

Do you have other examples of well known photographers using this style? What are your thoughts and feelings about public use of photography via social networking? Do you know of any fine art or professional photographers who have harnessed the power of social networking to produce mass participation artworks based around simple typology? We’d be intrigued to hear from you.

When I first discovered his work, it was like being taken by both shoulders and shaken – I had never seen anything like it before and it took me a while to really work out what all the fuss was about. However the more I explored Mark’s vast archive of images, I found threads appearing, and a strange rhythm in the photographs that urged me to keep looking. We’ve tried to ask Mark questions that reveal some of the methodology behind his practice. The interview is based around a new body of work called “Mexico XXI”. We’ve featured some of the photographs from this series in the interview, but you can see a wider edit over on Mark’s website.

First of all, can you give us a brief insight into your photographic history and how you came to be a photographer?

In 1986, I spent a year as an exchange student in Vereeniging, South Africa, a predominantly Afrikaner city south of Johannesburg. Coming from Michigan, it was altogether another planet for me. At the time, it was at the end of the Apartheid era, everything was still censored and tense. I would ride in the black-only sections of trains, police were everywhere, and dark clouds of smoke rose up from burning tyres from the violent clashes in the segregated township Sebokeng just outside of Vereeniging. Meanwhile, I lived with my rich white host family who lived in a very privileged almost unreal bubble. The whole experience gave me a rebellious and messed up feeling and changed my world view—I knew then I wanted to be a photographer. I started taking my camera most places and having adventures. When I got back home I enrolled myself in a photography courses at a local community college with a fantastic photographer and teacher named Linda Menger. She showed me lots of work of other photographers and really encouraged and mentored me to take my work to the next level.

(Hin Chua) How do you go about assembling your images into a larger body of work? To my eyes they appear to be of a relatively open-ended nature. What themes and guiding principles informed your choices during this process?

I know more what I don’t want than what I want in a photograph. It is a growing search, I am collecting, editing down. I put my photographs into “number ones” and then all the rest. A number one is when I really hit on something and I think about that photo for awhile. The photographs I am working on right now are for a new book tentatively called Mexico XXI. It is a mixture of portraits, mostly a cast of male characters and sprinkling of straight scenes and landscapes taken mostly in Mexico City. I like to start with one picture and build upon that mood or feeling, pictures with hopefully long shelf lives–because a lot of pictures just putter out and I don’t want to look at them anymore.

(Ben Roberts) Are your influences photographic or from a different sphere such as literature or film? Can you specify any of your influences?

Of course, I love looking at photographs. My favorite photographer in Mexico is Enrique Metinides, a photographer who worked for the “Las Nota Rojas” the violent working class newspapers in Mexico City. I just learned last week that he is basically housebound now and sets up backdrop pictures of fires and explosions, bloody crime scenes, then re-shoots scenes as lego-like fantasies, just as if he was out photographing like before. It is a little heartening because he can’t stop his photographic impulse, like a cat chasing a string. He now develops all his film cheaply at Costco stores too. That is pretty cool. I admire his non-self-conscious style, his pure eccentric passion, with no real art intentions except to make pictures.

I also have a big regard for movies made from the late 60’s to early 80’s, movies like Badlands, El Topo, The Mechanic, The Getaway, Straight Time, The French Connection, Westworld, The Shining. I am content just to enjoy seeing movies and not consciously take anything from them– The best inspiration is when it is slippery and unclear, though people tell me over and over my pictures give them a movie still feel, so yes it may come from my joy of movies.

(Hin) The scenes that you photograph, indeed your entire viewpoint, appear off kilter, unreal and larger than life; yet in some way they still represent a version of reality. How do you go about seeing this way?

I think my photography is driven foremost by my personality. I’ve got a pretty critical eye and I immediately try to take the obvious out, I like it when something is in front of me and I can’t quite see it just yet. I let the camera do some work and later a nice result of the unexpected comes through. So there is that initial inkling and it is important to recognize that first feeling that something could be there—where to point the camera, who to approach, what things to say, how big my smile is– all those small game changers that allow for imagination to enter and make interesting pictures – and they either workout or they don’t…

(Ben/Hin) Following on from the previous question, do you actively seek out people and situations that suit your vision, or do you feel that your photographs are an accurate cross section of the geographical area in which you shoot?

I am pretty active in seeking out people. Just yesterday, I met a lady in the street who had a collection of gaudy, colorful knitted yarn bags used for carrying pop bottles. She looked quite young but had all white hair, very blue eyes. There seems to be law of attraction and people respond in an immediate spontaneous and real way when I take an interest in them. I got her number and plan on calling her up because I didn’t have my camera with me then. Maybe it will be an easy picture, maybe it could be a little too direct and too “charactery,” but for sure would make a nice adventure. She is definitely whiter than most Mexicans, “una guerita.” (I just called her house, no answer). Who knows what other pictures could come out of it? I imagine her as kind of scary, colorfully knitted spinster, like Sissy Spacek’s mom in the movie Carrie—Ok, there is a movie reference. I tend to go for those contrasts of what is usually not expected from Mexico, or how people should look like here, maybe because they stand out a lot more. Recently, I have been seeing Tarot card readers and getting my fortune read then I take a portrait or something—the fortunes are equally cool! But, I still rely on the day to day unexpected meeting of people I find in the street.

(Hin) Did there come a time when you knew that “VIP” was complete? What have you learnt from VIP
? (note – “VIP” is Mark’s monograph from 2006 – you can read more about it in this article on 2point8)

I was discovering digital then and everything was new, I was getting my feet wet, meeting strangers, I mainly used my little 4 megapixel Canon G2 camera and a 1 megapixel Rollei d7. I knew I was going to do something with them one day, but was just photographing everyday not thinking too much about when I would finish. In the end, I really couldn’t take any more pictures because my cameras had fallen apart. It took about a month to edit about three years of work for the eventual book. Though the characters themselves fit well with the Very Important Person theme, I think I learned that to make photographs is an important choice. In the end, you say something more about yourself than about the people you are photographing. Because the people and things we are attracted to probably say something deeply about why we are attracted to them in the first place. We all chisel out the world into our own little VIPs and everyone has a different kind of list. I had to go through those attractions in VIP in order to get to the people and circumstances I am photographing now.

(Hin) How strongly connected do you feel your work is to Mexico and Detroit? While the locations are obviously deeply infused within your images, do you feel that they are integral to your process? Do you have a desire to make work in other places?

By my own circumstances I have made pictures from Detroit and Mexico City. I don’t think they are integral to my process. Though these two cities have definitely given my photographs a certain feel that I don’t think I could get from any other places. I would love to go to Los Angeles and make pictures. I have never been there and a lot of people tell me there are things in common with Mexico City. Here in Mexico, I want to spend more time in Acapulco, Merida and Tijuana. I would love to eventually go to Brazil too. I hope that my pictures remain consistent no matter where I go and you could tell that I made them.

(James Hendrick) You are working across divides of culture and nationality. What are your thoughts on photographing Mexico as a foreigner? Does it constrain or Liberate you? Does having the ‘outsider perspective’ provide a unique value?

I think I feel pretty much at home in Mexico now – next year I will become a Mexican citizen, though I am sure I will never shake that otherness, outsider feeling I get here – heck, I feel that same feeling in Detroit too, and really anywhere I go. Taking pictures makes anyone into an instant outsider, looking through the glass. I think that is an important grasping point when taking pictures. You don’t need to be traveling or be a foreigner to have an outside perspective, but certainly that point of view has to be turned on at some point and that is perhaps when traveling and living something different is a great tool and button to push. Because when you go back home you gotta “hit it while it is hot” before the illusion of familiarity seeps back into view and creates a visual stupor of sorts. So it is always nice to brainwash yourself into seeing things as if they were for the first time or take trips. Plus that is a good way to keep you sharp.

(James) Have you found differences in how you are regarded as a photographer in Mexico, versus in the US? Have these differences helped you or challenged you?

Well in Mexico I can make jokes with my accent in Spanish and pretend to be the stupid Gringo. Back home in Detroit I can be the funny weird white boy in the hood. Both give me some degree of advantages. In that way photography is definitely a hustle to get the shot.

My dad is a life insurance salesman and I learned from him how to put the foot in the door. It is very manipulative and a little deceitful. In Mexico you can always be the tourist, so maybe it is a bit easier here. But in the States people really like attention while Mexicans can be are generally little more shy and reserved. But of course there are always exceptions.

(Ben) In Mexico XXI, there seems to be a few story strands woven amongst a larger whole – represented by repeated motifs. One theme that jumped out at me was that of people sleeping – but I couldn’t help linking this in my mind to the issue of mortality in the context of Mexico’s current atmosphere of violence. The place that these people (usually men) choose to sleep are streets and sidewalks; they make the viewer question momentarily whether these are violent images or merely people sleeping. was this intentional?

Society out there is pretty destructive in really direct ways and we see this splattered on the headlines on a daily bases, with the drug wars and all the decapitated heads found in coolers, the kidnappings, the general apocalyptic, deathly smog, now influenza scares–chaotic world which is Mexico City. But, I think there are a lot of sleeping lions in everyday experiences in Mexico and where we can’t quite see that sensational bite.

I honestly don’t want to directly photograph the heads rolling per say, the violence— I am content to try to find the less direct pictures or the quiet-violence or the pictures that go up against the everyday saying of “no pasa nada,” “nothing ever happens.” It seems that Mexico is always on the verge of pulling itself from failure, yet eventually sinks again into a dark and unsure time, slumbering into a world that tries to make everything seem fine again.

There are hints of this in my picture of the football team lying down meditating before a game which approaches something like a massacre but isn’t and then there is the very real picture of a long trickle of blood flowing from under a sheet that covers a man, footprints still there from when he arrived to work that morning and not knowing he would fall that day from scaffolding while painting a sculpture of a giant horse.

I kept on thinking that day how unfair and absurd that was and I thought of his family and how overpowering and how unforgiving a city can become; of course that picture wouldn’t be the same if you could see the dead body.

(Raoul Gatepin) There’s an image in your Mexico XXI series of two women holding brooms. It’s an odd scenario; did you direct the subjects in this photograph?

I wanted to take picture of the maids that were cleaning the sidewalk outside a residence. I asked them if I could take a picture of their brooms. The said ok and they unpredictably faced each-other in a mirror-like way. They were both very shy. Fantastic, I thought, and I took the picture.

(Raoul) Do you rally against setting up portraits, or are you comfortable with it?

I am very comfortable approaching people to ask them if I can take their picture. A lot of the portraits I do are done very quickly, under a minute sometimes, I like working in a rush because I don’t get too familiar to what is in front of me and fail to react to odd special moments —ultimately, the environment, background and situation inform choices as well. Approaching someone is unpredictable – people exert their own particular gravity and move in their own universe. Unexpected things happen when you are in this space photographing with someone. So the setting up process is allowing for unexpected things to happen. When people ask me if I set something up in a picture, I tell them that I really just don’t have that kind of imagination.

If you have any further questions for Mark, or think you would like to expand upon any of his thoughts, please follow up in the comments. We’d like to thank Mark for his time and patience in answering our questions. As part of the PhotoEspana 2009 festival, Mark is showing his work at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. All photographs in this interview © Mark Powell