MICHAEL MARTEN

Michael was born in 1947 in London, United Kingdom (age 77 years). Michael Marten started taking photographs as a teenager and has been involved with photography ever since. His first job was caption writer at the Camera Press photo agency. He also was formerly a graduate student in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh, and now teaches at SOAS. In 1973 he was one of a group who published ‘An Index of Possibilities’, an alternative encyclopedia of ideas. In 1979 he started the specialist photo agency, Science Photo Library. He has co-authored several books of scientific imagery, including ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ (1978) and ‘The Particle Odyssey’ (2002).

Sea Change:

High quality use of diptych and triptych and exploring low vs excessive tides to peer how it adapts to a panorama scene.

Since 2003 Michael Marten has travelled to unique elements of the British coast to picture equal perspectives at high and low tide, six or eighteen hours apart. His unexpected pics monitor how the two times day by day rhythm of ebb and flood can dramatically rework the landscape. Also in 2003 Michael has concentrated on landscape photography. His first major series was ‘Sea Change’ (2003-12). A second project, ‘Godrevy’, was exhibited and published in 2015.

Why have I chosen this artist?

I have chosen this artist because I love the atmosphere that each images creates and how its set. I like the way he takes three different pictures but all in the same place but just different angles, it makes it more interesting.

Who was Michael Marten inspired by?

Michael had loads of inspirations but the main people that inspired him was David Stanley, Tony Mamic and Bruce Percy.

“Finally, inspiration comes from many sources (most listed on his website but stand outs being David Stanley, Tony Mamic and Bruce Percy).”

why did Michael marten mostly take photographs of the sea?

Michael Marten says – “I am interested in showing how landscape changes over time through natural processes and cycles. The camera that observes low and high tide side by side enables us to observe simultaneously two moments in time, two states of nature“.

How does this work relate to the theme of Anthropocene?

YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE

The ruins of Detroit:

Until the 1960s, Detroit became one in all America`s maximum crucial cities. It became a hub of enterprise with a populace of virtually million and a skyline to rival that of any U.S. city. Furthermore, its homes have been monuments to its achievement and energy within side the first 1/2 of of the 20th century. However, on the begin of the twenty-first century, the ones identical monuments are actually ruins: the United Artists Theatre, the Whitney Building, the Farwell Building. And the as soon as ravishing Michigan Central Station (unused in view that 1988) nowadays appearance as though a bomb had dropped on Motor City, leaving at the back of the ruins of a as soon as notable civilization. So, in a chain of weekly photographic announcements for Time mag called “Detroit`s Beautiful, Horrible Decline,” photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre had been revealing the size of deterioration in Detroit. “The kingdom of break is basically a brief scenario that occurs at a few point, the unstable end result of extrude of generation and the autumn of empires,” write Marchand and Meffre. “Photography regarded to us as a modest manner to maintain a bit little bit of this ephemeral kingdom.” As Detroit’s white centre magnificence maintains to desert the metropolis middle for its dispersed suburbs, and its downtown high-rises empty out, those remarkable images, which deliver each the imperious grandeur of the metropolis’s structure and its sincerely surprising decline, maintain a second that warns us all the transience of super epochs.

Why have I chosen this artist?

The quality of their work cannot be disagreed, and they have added great value to the medium of photography. I like the way they take photos of completely different places, places that no one hardly goes. Where its nice and calm or sometimes messy but still calm and peaceful.

Who was Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre inspired by?

Marchand and Meffre are both influenced by the typological and full aspects of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the German photographers of Industrie-Kultur, as well as the large-format images of Robert Polidori.

“Now these cathedrals of industry lie shattered, broken and forgotten, tombs to man’s hubris, a reminder that nothing lasts forever, a reminder that we all will perish and rot one day.”

How does their work relate to the theme of Anthropocene?

It relates to Anthropocene because they take pictures of mostly abandone places and that shows how places can be detroyed or not wanted anymore because of the environment, could also be because of war or other any reason.