Magnum Photos – Matt Martin – Curator

The Matt Martin talk was the third talk at the Magnum Photo event ‘Navigating the Photography Art Market’ and he provided the gallery curators perspective on the Art Market. Matt was a young photographer who was shooting bands, fashion and youth culture. He uses photocopying to create zines. His final year project at university was Ice Cream a curated project ‘Eat wel, stay fit, die anyway’ in 2012.

He started to curate his own exhibitions in Brighton and London with 6 exhibitions every 2 months, while he continued to develop his zines. His philosophy to self publishing was to sell work at cost to get more people interested in art.

Eventually he joined Doomed which is project space in London which typically has 3 exhibitions a month. Matt continues to produce a monthly zine. Doomed has recently had a Japanese photoshow of rare images showing works from photographers from photo collectives.

Matt’s advice to photographers is look at different ways to exhibit your work and dare to be different.Exhibit your work in a public space, consider using guerrilla art, or pop-up art using a van to share your art with the community. Consider having something that people can takeaway to remember the event.

Matt was one of the people who reviewed sample images from my two series ‘Re-seeingChildhood’ and ‘City Canyons’ both were projects he thought were very interesting as they had strong stories behind the images.

We discussed my final project withe objective of exploring ways that the work could have impact on a reasonable budget as when I had started to cost out some of my lightbox prints each item had an estimated build cost of £600. We discussed the option of creating a large wooden structure of the Essex coastline and the inserting smaller lightbox prints into the larger installation. Another option we discussed was printing layers on transparent vinyl attached to pulley to allow the viewer to decided how many layers made up the image. The discussion has certainly got me thinking about exploring different options for presenting my images and using no traditional substrates for printing.