Sunday 15 January 2012

Shifting Sands: Guy Martin

The Old Man and me goes off to Falmouth last Friday - to catch one of the last days of an exhibition of Guy Martin's photos of Egypt and Libya during the Arab Spring conflict. The exhibition was at The Poly there... and sorry it's already closed cos it was only on for a week!

Guy Martin is a young photographer who was seriously injured in the same rocket attack in Libya that killed his two companions, documentary maker and photographer Tim Hetherington, and US photographer Chris Hondros.

The photos are good, the whole thing moving. I's struck by two photographs of Egyptian protestors racing through Cairo. In one - squares of paper briefing the protestors on the chants and slogans drift through the air around them. There are also some beautiful, almost abstract photos of the patterns left by fire... one a burnt out room with scorched filing cabinets, another the pattern of blast on the tarmac surface of a road after a Molotov cocktail has exploded.

The Old Man prefers a more narrative approach and is struck by a photo of three young man standing in front of a building: one peers round the corner, the next stands behind him holding a gun and almost touchingly out of place with his glasses and flip-flop sandals, finally another young man stands nervously behind both, studying them. There is another photo that The Old Man picks out with a young fighter crouching near the floor against the wall inside a building, he is looking up at a window, the light falling through it catches his eyes and lights them up.

Sorry that the exhibition was so brief and couldn't pass on the info earlier, but you can see some of Guy Martin's work at his own website here.

And speaking personally... I long for stuff to be exhibited down here that's national or international. It's all so Cornwall-centric......
I'll get told off for that won't I.

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