Photographer Mark Power attempts to find the America he fell in love with from watching TV shows in the 1960s

A personal and timely exploration of both American culture and its physical landscape, his images of "reality and myth" are to be featured in a new exhibition at the Magnum Print Room in London this January.

Coinciding with the start of a momentous year in US politics, the show will look back at the photographs that have defined and shaped Power's project so far. A project that was inspired by Power's childhood. Power is from a generation who grew up in the English suburbs of the 1960s, enchanted by the TV shows which crossed the Atlantic from the US – a form of cultural imperialism – and in particular the allure and myth of the Western. When he began photographing in America, Power subconsciously began searching for this mythical landscape – one which perhaps never existed at all.

Combined with Power's outlook as an outsider, this photographic survey presents a unique and shifting perspective on this complicated period in America's history.

"While the project would seem to echo countless other American 'road trips', these pictures are in fact made during long walks through a series of towns and cities, which allow quieter, perhaps more contemplative pictures to emerge," says Power. "I'm attempting to construct a complex narrative, but I don't think of myself as a storyteller. I see a multitude of subjects as interconnected, each affecting and informing the other. I have a sense that I'm building an enormous jigsaw puzzle but with little idea what the final, completed picture will be."

Good Morning, America will launch at the Magnum Print Room in London on 8 January 2020 and will run until 3 April 2020. The project is also set to become a series of five books, the third of which will be published next autumn by GOST Books. Discover more at markpower.co.uk.