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Two-thousand Clones go up against two-thousand Marines in Alaska with both sides having self-sustaining underground bunkers made of modern materials five miles away from each other.
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The fictitious meets the real.The battlefield for this debate is Alaska during either the summer or winter with both sides starting five miles away from each other in their usual mindsets. This is an exploration of that, closely merging two realities together. Conflict has always informed pop culture. “It’s not insulting,” he tells me and there’s excitement in his voice as he talks. I ask him if he’s worried that the public is losing touch with the military, or if he finds it insulting that people care more about Star Wars than real wars. He also hopes the photos will get some Star Wars fans to think about America’s various wars.Ī lot of people love Star Wars, but fewer know much about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He gets positive feedback from combat veterans who tell him the pictures are therapeutic. Those small stories mean a whole lot to Callahan’s fans. It mirrors what you see in the real world, with photographs coming out of combat zones. “Because there are so many of them I can quickly put them under a microscope and very briefly explore their thoughts, feelings and what they’re going through without tethering all those stories together. To make them human.” Those little stories he tells come in a flash, and he says there’s no overarching narrative to the project. “To take them off their fictitious pedestals and ground them in reality.
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“I wanted to tell stories,” he says of the portraits. The journalistic vignettes of clone troopers and galactic warfare.” “That’s what you’ve seen in the most recent work,” he explains.
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He saved my life.”įor Callahan, the Galactic Warfighters project is about joining the fantastic world of Star Wars with the reality of the Marines. A Wolfe trooper kicked me down and curled himself around the explosive when it detonated. “A time-delayed rocket plummeted into the ground feet from me, and I froze. “It was hard to see on the ground and I found myself in a crater with a few other men,” the caption reads. In one a trooper stands behind the chair where a charred helmet rests. Each photo has a stark white background and a small paragraph detailing the soldier’s thoughts. Along with the action shots, Callahan’s work includes black and white portraits of clone soldiers in chairs. act as an ode to that.”īut “Galactic Warfighters” goes deeper. “As we get older we still tend to anthropomorphize objects … our phones, our cars. He told me that most people give their toys personalities when they’re young. In one, troopers push through the vegetation of some unknown planet, in another one trooper aims a rocket launcher at an unseen enemy as debris explodes around him.Ĭallahan explains that he’s trying to give life to these troopers in the same way he did when he was a kid. Most of the photos are black and white action shots of Republic-era clone troopers in combat. “In the past six or seven months it’s picked up its voice,” Callahan tells me. “Galactic Warfighters,” Callahan’s Star Wars gallery on Instagram, is the product of two years of experimenting with toy photography. He rested, but he also learned a new trade. He flew back home to recover, but just because his leg needed time to heal didn’t mean the Marines were done with him. He’d only been in Afghanistan a month when he snapped his leg during a patrol. Above, at top and below - Matthew Callahan photos How did an active duty Marine manage to get his friends into clone trooper armor? But there’s no people in any of his pictures.
STAR WARS CLONE MARINE SERIES
The pictures from his Galactic Warfighter series are beautiful stills of a world in chaos - clone troopers fighting galactic battles across a vast empire.Īt first glance, I wondered how he afforded all the armor and props. This isn’t a deleted scene from the Star Wars prequel trilogy, nor a sneak peek at The Force Awakens. Another droid stands waiting, arms bound and held by the sturdy arms of a trooper. It’s a black and white photograph and so seems menacing and real. The machine looks up at his captors - clone troopers hidden behind white armor dinged and scuffed by constant battle. The droid seems to struggle against his restraints.