A Photographic Life - 57: Plus Guy Martin

In episode 57 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering his recent week in Vancouver, Canada, and the relationship between photography and lens-based-media contemporary art practice. Plus this week photographer Guy Martin takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Guy Martin was born in Cornwall, England and graduated from the Documentary Photography course at the University of Wales, Newport in 2006. He began pursuing long term personal documentary projects while studying at Newport, one of which, Trading Over the Borderline - a documentation of the border region between Turkey and Northern Iraq and its trade routes – won him The Guardian and Observer Hodge Award for young photographers. Inspired by regions that are in periods of transition, he went on to pursue a long term project on the re-birth of the Cossack movement and Russian nationalism in Southern Russia and the Caucasus from 2005 to 2007, which culminated in the documentation of the Russian/Georgia conflict in August 2008. From January 2011 he began to document the revolutions sweeping through the Middle East and North Africa, photographing the revolution in Egypt before documenting the civil war in Libya from the east to the besieged western city of Misrata. In 2012 Martin was left seriously injured with shrapnel lodged in his spleen after a rocket attack in Misrata, in which his fellow photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, D Magazine, FADER, Monocle, Huck, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal and Time. In 2011 he became a member of the photographic agency Panos and in 2012 his work from Egypt and Libya formed the basis for joint exhibitions at the Spanish Cultural Centre in New York, at the HOST Gallery in London, the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff and the SIDE Gallery in Newcastle. His first solo show Shifting Sands was held at the Poly Gallery in Falmouth, Cornwall. He now divides his time between Istanbul and London. https://guy-martin.co.uk You can also access and subscribe to these podcasts at SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/unofphoto on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-photographic-life/id1380344701 on Player FM https://player.fm/series/a-photographic-life and Podbean www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/i6uqx-6d9ad/A-Photographic-Life-Podcast Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer in Photography, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n' Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry. His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay can now be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd47549knOU&t=3915s. © Grant Scott 2019