The British photographer Mark Power has always been fascinated by large-scale construction projects, the bigger the better, and in 1997 he had an opportunity to document one that covered 87,000 sq metres of contaminated wasteland in south-east London and cost £43m to build: the Millennium Dome.
Granted access by the New Millennium Experience Company, he made more than 100 trips to the site on the Greenwich peninsula, watching the Labour government’s grand plan take shape over the course of two years. This scene was captured on 2 December 1999, as the Millennium Experience was frantically coming together ahead of the at-all-costs deadline on New Year’s Eve. The crouching figure wrapped in plastic is Ron Mueck’s Boy, a nearly 16ft (five metre) sculpture by the Australian artist famed for his hyper-realistic rendering of the human form. It had just been delivered to the Mind zone, one of 14 themed areas into which the Dome had been divided, and was still in its wrapping when Power took the photograph.
It would be easy to imagine that Mueck’s figure was crouching in anticipation of the flak that would be hurled at the Dome from all directions in the coming months – nobody seemed happy about the project after its disastrous opening on 31 December. In fact, Mueck had drawn inspiration in part from indigenous Australians vigilantly scanning the plain for game.
Power’s photographs of the Dome were first published in his 2000 book Superstructure. Now he’s gathered them into a much grander 520-page publication entitled Fashion, drawing from his documentation of multiple mega-projects – the construction of the Airbus A380, the refurbishment of the government Treasury building in Whitehall, factories, quarries, shipyards – in 24 countries over 27 years. Despite the colossal scale of many of these undertakings, Power likes to keep the human perspective in mind when he works. “We might think everything is built by machines these days,” he says, “but of course this isn’t true. It’s still about human ingenuity, creativity and sheer graft.” Fashion by Mark Power, published by GOST Books, is out now
Untitled #146 © Mark Power / Magnum
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