The Strange Case of Achilles and the Tortoise, 2021

Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise proposes an infinite regress: however swiftly Achilles runs, he must first reach the point where the tortoise began, and by then the tortoise has moved on — progress perpetually deferring its own arrival. It is a fitting emblem for the condition this project sets out to diagnose. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Martins had grown increasingly convinced that photography had reached its own version of this impasse: image-making had become so thoroughly aligned with technocapitalist logic — the latest lens, the latest body, the latest application, the latest operating system — that the pursuit of optimisation had quietly displaced the act of creation itself. The upgrade was always imminent; the image, perpetually deferred.

Compounding this was a well-documented neurological phenomenon: that an abundance of choice, rather than liberating the decision-maker, tends to paralyse them. Offered everything, we choose nothing. The limitless possibility that digital tools promised had become, increasingly, a form of creative foreclosure.

The Covid-19 pandemic introduced something the medium had ceased to generate on its own: genuine constraint. Working from his analogue darkroom, Martins began gathering the expendable residue of his own printing process — test prints, contact sheets, darkroom masks, offcuts and incidental supplies accumulated over twenty years — materials that would ordinarily be discarded without ceremony, here salvaged and allowed to resonate.

The resulting collages can thus be seen as photographic ready-mades. Like Duchamp’s found objects before them, they do not announce themselves as the product of a skilled hand transforming raw material into something new. Instead, they propose a different kind of authorship — one rooted in appropriation, instinct , and contingency rather than mastery. In doing so, they press against a notion that, while long dismantled in contemporary art, persists with surprising tenacity in photographic circles: that the photographer’s value lies in the unique, handcrafted singularity of the image. This work quietly, insistently disagrees — offering instead the beauty of what was already there, waiting to be seen.

The works in this gallery extend and deepen the inquiry begun in the 2020 series of the same title.