Mark Power and Stuart Smith
DOCUMENTARIANS
Photographer, Magnum Photos
Designer, Director, and Publisher, Gost Books
Brighton
Mark Power has had an eclectic career in which he has worked as an English teacher, a television actor, and a fish farm attendant in Hong Kong. He studied life-drawing and painting at art school in England and put his skills to use creating cinema murals in Bangkok. At one point, he even produced large numbers of identical paintings for others to sell as their own in the Australian outback, a task as questionable as it is intriguing. When a stint in a chemist’s camera department led him to realize he prefered the camera to the pencil, though, he decided to officially become a photographer. In 2002, Mark was nominated to become a Magnum Photographer, an elite honor he officially received five years later. Mark’s work has been exhibited in venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Marrakech Museum of Photography and Visual Art.
Stuart Smith is a designer, artful typographer, and publisher extraordinaire. His career began in 1987 at the Architectural Association, after which he moved to Phaidon Press, before going on to establish his own studio, SMITH, in 1994. The firm offers everything from art direction to advertising, artwork commissioning to exhibition design. He co-founded GOST Books with Gordon MacDonald in 2013. The London-based publishing house specializes in photography and visual arts and likes to keep their subject matter consciously unexpected. They’ve worked with the likes of Jonas Bendiksen, Brian Griffin, Rafal Milach, and Mark, of course. In addition to working as Director of GOST, Stuart travels around the world teaching people how not to showcase their photography.
During the House of Beautiful Business, Mark and Stuart’s homebase will be the Live Lab, a pop-up photo lab inside the Gallery House designed and run by Magnum Photos in association with the BCG Henderson Institute. Magnum has hosted similar residencies in Paris and London, and we’re happy to add Lisbon to the list of storied locales.