ARLES.- The ‘Parallel State’ is a term hijacked by Turkish president Tayyip Erdoğan and turned on its head, a rebranding, essentially, of the better-known ‘deep state.' As Erdoğan rose to power from the early 2000s onward, he was increasingly convinced that he was being undermined by his own media, police, judiciary, military, and various foreign powers—all part of a traitorous parallel state that could and would be blamed for any of his mishaps and Turkey’s ills.
A once uniquely Turkish phrase, the parallel state has become a byword for power grabs, populist rhetoric, and a police state on the hunt for an unfixed yet ever-present enemy, recalling Western politicians’ endless invocations of ‘terrorist’ forces at work.
Martin’s series encompasses the idealistic Gezi Park protests of 2013 through to last year's failed coup and the subsequent purges. Indistinguishably intermixed are images taken behind the scenes on Turkish soap opera sets, which serve as a chillingly prescient black mirror to Turkey’s recent history and his own documentation thereof.
With social media assuming an increasingly influential role in contemporary conflicts, new virtual battlefields on mobile, computer and television screens have become as relevant as the physical ones into which they feed. Martin strives to address the complexity of capturing ‘authentic’ moments as a documentary photographer today, confronted with media-conscious subjects acutely aware of how to stage a narrative for easiest consumption.
Critically acknowledging the danger in any figure claiming the impossible status of truth-teller, the series serves as a timely vision 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 in which power at the highest levels of government can be exercised unchecked.
Guy Martin is a 33-year-old British documentary photographer, represented by nineteensixtyeight. Winner of the Sony World Photography Award for Current Affairs (2014), Martin is known for his powerful coverage of the revolutions that swept through the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. In 2013, he relocated to Istanbul where he has been producing a long-term project on the rise of Turkish soft power and the complex, powerful new identities forming in the country. The resulting project, The Parallel State, will be exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles 2017 and will be published as a book in 2018. Martin's work has been featured in Time, The New York Times, Guardian, Observer, Der Spigel, among others. He is a former recipient of the Guardian and Observer Hodge Award for young photographers and winner of the FIPCOMM award (2014). His work has been exhibited internationally.
