Guy Martin, a British photographer working and living within the UK came to talk to us as a guest lecturer in our third year. I found his lecture really inspiring as he was talking to us about how he got into the position that he is now within the industry. He spoke honestly to us about his struggles within the photographic world and how it has shaped him into the person that he is today. I was really interested in hearing about his project ‘The Parallel State’ as he spoke about it in depth and what it meant to him as a project. 

I wrote some notes during the lecture to remind me of what Martin spoke to us about. The Parallel State was a project that he start in 2012, focusing on photojournalism this project focuses on Arab revolutions with his move to Turkey in 2012. He photographed the things that were hidden in plain sight with the political movements in the Middle East, showing the spying that took place there in the early 1950’s. ‘The Parallel State is a multi-layered project which began life as an examination of the Turkish soap opera and film industry but evolved over the course of five years from 2012 to 2017 into a semi-fictional study of truth, reality and lies in contemporary Turkey. The work guides viewers through a chilling black mirror of how a society strictly segregated into heroes and villains, plagued by doubt and divisive falsehoods, can be left with a vacuum of objective fact.’ His work focuses heavily on Turkish entertainment stereotypes as the project was initially started to show the popular soap operas within Turkey. He spoke about how he started this project to show how powerful the media can be in the way that the public see different industries and people. Real life events involving the government would be included in the narratives, showing a reflection of the times and what ‘state’ the industries and the country was in at the time. Martin spoke about how this project was a mixture between the constructed narrative of photography and documentary. 

I was personally really intrigued by this particular project, although it is not my personal style, I could acknowledge the amount of time and effort that goes into a project of this magnitude. I really liked the use of cinematic photography within this project and his use of lighting throughout all of the photographs. The photographs are made to look exactly like film stills which I think is really interesting, and actually reminds me slightly of Philip Lorca Dicorcia, a photographer who I was very much inspired by throughout my degree so far.

I have really enjoyed the guest lectures that we have had throughout this year and feel as though they have been an integral part of my final year of university. They have enabled me to learn a lot and speak to different people within the industry who are already accomplished photographer’s.