Output details

Black Country stories

Power’s ‘Black Country Stories’ project was undertaken in response to a commission by arts organisation Multistory and exhibited at The New Art Gallery Walsall in 2012. Its research aims to reinvent artistic documentation of working class Britain in the tradition of Mass Observation in 1930s Britain. Power was invited to research and document the social landscape of the Black Country, and undertake a critical and theoretical investigation of the ‘lipstick effect’, a term referring to increased lipstick sales in times of austerity.

Power conducted a sustained anthropological and visual exploration of the Black Country towns of West Bromwich, Dudley and Wolverhampton and their hinterlands, involving site visits, the study of nineteenth-century archival photographic records, and discussions with local residents and businessmen and women about the effect of the economic downturn on the West Midlands. Using large-format photography alongside sound installations and short films, he documented the broken and fading landscape of post-industrial towns and shopping arcades, finding a splendour and muted beauty in a visual discourse of austerity and forgotten or unnoticed urban spaces. This contrasted sharply with the individuality of footwear, the vivid colours of tattooist’s dyes, make-up and beauty parlours, and the life and vibrancy of the region’s sex industries, captured in photographs, moving image and soundscapes.

Sound installations develop Power’s previous narrative exploration of image and sound in ‘The Shipping Forecast’ (RAE1996) and are combined with the use of arresting, unusual images and austere landscapes, which Power developed while in Poland working on ‘The Sound of Two Songs’ (Output 1), to create an historical record of the Black Country that is both evocative and poetic. This body of work was reviewed in the local and national press and featured in the ‘Journal of the Royal Photographic Society’ and the ‘British Journal of Photography’.

SEE DIGITAL PORTFOLIO.