Martin Brent Guest graduated with an MA in Photography from Falmouth University in 2020. He is a lens-based artist working with analogue and digital photography and technology, often recording what is, unaltered but also what is not, using tableau techniques to achieve this. Martin is inspired by the work of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, William Eggleston and The New Topographics collective.
These images are from The Inbetween Places project and are found and tableaux landscapes formed from images of real-world locations and structures. The name derived from the feeling Brent gets when finding and photographing these places, neither the beginning nor the end of his journeys. Reflecting his personal anxiety with global politics, the current obsession with borders, the fear of ‘others’ and exploitation of the planet in the pursuit of profit be it by consumerism or war.
The project’s intention is to challenge the illusion of identity, nation state and artificial borders, it contextually reframes the landscape both geographically and metaphysically and in doing so walks a path first trodden by the Pittura Metafisica movement and its founder Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).
Exploring recorded historical fact and chronology, the aim is to create new places, new or altered memories, sometimes utilising absurd juxtapositions, icons from popular culture and brands to create alternate historical threads. What might have been, had certain events proceeded in alternate directions, to what we see and are familiar with today.
The land, the things and structures imposed on it are used as a symbol of ownership and power, also used to placate the mass with the placement of a flag, the production of cheap food along with the promise of ownership and legacy. Yet that power is exclusionary, be it by birth, socio economic status or political affiliation. Subverting the gaze of this mass he hopes to at least provoke discussion as to how society can continue to other vast sections of the world population based purely on the geography of their birth, politics or economic status or biology.