A Dying Monster is a photographic collection of corporate logos; plastered on people’s bodies, machines, and surroundings.
In A Dying Monster, Eren Ileri treats Formula 1 motor racing as a defining marker of extraction capitalism accelerating toward its own decline. In this mainly black-and-white photographic documentation representing a particular time frame of motor racing of the last decade, Eren paints a picture of Formula 1 that captures the racing spectacle’s contemporary character: drivers, as mere operators at the steering wheel, executing high-performance tasks with an extreme level of preciseness but with increasingly less variety of personal driving styles; and their technological counterparts as extensions of human bodies, aided by corporate organizations populated by engineers and alike, and driven by complex data analyses.
The photo book compiles Eren’s work between 2015 and 2018 when he visited various Grand Prix motor races in Abu Dhabi, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Monaco, and Italy. In addition to the photography work, the book includes a text by Bécquer Medak-Seguín which interrogates the duality of competing formations of the masculinities of two Formula 1 drivers of the past, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.