This series results from research and projects developed over the past 8 years with organisations such as prisons, legal medicine institutes and human rights organisations based in conflict zones.
Although the artworks do not deal with the themes covered by these earlier projects they explore, nonetheless, the ontological framework that underpins them, in particular Freud’s early ideas about scopophilia (the pleasure of looking).

Developed in North Africa over six years, this project is based on a poignant and very personal story and experience: the death and disappearance of Edgar Martins’ close friend – photojournalist Anton Hammerl – during the 2011 Libyan war.
Inspired by the writings of Georges Perec and Georges Didi-Huberman, and set against the backdrop of the decisive but paradoxical role that photography has played in conflict zones, Martins’ project uses Anton’s story as a springboard to explore a challenging premise: how to tell a story when there is no witness, no testimony, no evidence, no subject.

Inspired by Georges Perec’s use of constraint as a means of approaching unspeakable loss, Lipographic Light Studies translates GPS coordinates linked to the disappearance of photojournalist Anton Hammerl during the 2011 Libyan war into the colour filtration values of an analogue enlarger — latitude and longitude rendered as light, each line’s weight and orientation mapping the course of an investigation, its dead ends and milestones. Paired with found photographs recovered from the same sites, the series holds absence at its core: no direct image, no clear resolution — only a reverberation that cannot be identified nor denied.

Taking its name from a term coined by Martins in homage to Georges Perec’s use of literary constraint as a means of approaching unspeakable loss, Lipographic Light Studies reflects on the abduction, death, and disappearance of photojournalist Anton Hammerl during the Libyan war of 2011. The works were produced by exposing photosensitive paper to varying light sources and wavelengths, their patterns drawn from testimonies gathered from journalists forcibly abducted from conflict zones.

A collaboration between Edgar Martins, the Archive of Modern Conflict, and two anonymous soldiers — one Ukrainian, one Russian — this project draws on eight years of collecting to present photographs taken primarily within the Soviet military between the 1940s and 1980s. The images expose a theatre of conflict official history rarely stages: the boredom, the violent game-like play, and the surprising, sometimes transgressive intimacies that flourish in the long threshold between peace and open war — moments whose full meaning could not be spoken aloud in the society that produced them, and which the camera alone was trusted to hold.

The Strange Case of Achilles and the Tortoise is a series of abstract collages made from over twenty years of accumulated darkroom residue — test prints, contact sheets, masks, and offcuts salvaged from the production of earlier works. Initiated during the Covid-19 pandemic as a deliberate response to photography’s increasing entanglement with technocapitalist culture, the works unfold entirely outside any photographic apparatus, governed solely by constraint. These are objects that outlasted their original purpose — and, in doing so, found a stranger, more enduring one.

Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s “The Atrocity Exhibition”, in particular the prescient, psychosexual 1967 piece, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, and developed with the Institute of Legal Medicine & Forensic Sciences, Edgar Martins’ new project is a speculative investigation of the relationship between fire and death, pyromania and desire. By focusing on the hand, as his subject, as well as the case of Ron dos Santos (a prolific pyromaniac), Martins guided us through a visual journey of our worst fears, impulses, anxieties and apprehensions.

This project stems from a collaboration between Mia Salvato and Edgar Martins. It examines and reimagines an album of photographs from the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict, taken by an unnamed Cleveland-based (USA) policeman in the 1960s, who produced erotic images of black women in his spare time. By juxtaposing image and test print used for chemical and color control in C-type analogue printing machines these images open up a debate about the politicisation of the representation of the female body, gender performance and photographer/subject power relations and their implications on contemporary photographic discourse.

Initiated during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Strange Case of Achilles and the Tortoise brings two bodies of work into deliberate dialectical tension: sedimentary collages built from twenty years of darkroom residue, produced entirely without a camera, alongside photographs taken from the upper floors of buildings Martins inhabited across China during three disease outbreaks spanning twelve years (H1N1, SARS & Covid-19). Constraint, in both cases, is the generative force — and the distance between the two practices is where the work truly lives.

The Life and Death of Schrödinger’s Cat is a 20min, 4channel sound film, which deploys a succession of photographs, strongly reminiscent of scientific illustration and documentation, and that remarkable 1977 photobook by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Evidence, in which their appropriations use an older, outdated mode of photography to show a testing of truth and certainty in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. All fail to illustrate and communicate and become instead science fiction, beautiful enigmas.

Destinerrance is a term proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his seminal book La Carte Postale, which combines notions of destination and destiny with error or errancy. Derrida plays with the idea of the postcard – the text open, unsealed, free for all to read, yet closed, encrypted, intended for one addressee – as the emblem of writing at once always disclosive yet closed and enigmatic. Every note, every photograph, I submit, is foundationally readable yet ultimately unreadable.
The artworks displayed in this gallery depict photographs of personal letters I exchanged inmates at HMP Birmingham over a period of two years.

What Photography has in Common with an Empty Vase is a multifaceted body of work developed from a collaboration with Grain Projects and HM Prison Birmingham (the largest category B prison in the Midlands, UK), its inmates, their families as well as a myriad of other local organisations and individuals. Using the social context of incarceration as a starting point, I explore the philosophical concept of absence, and address a broader consideration of the status of the photograph when questions of visibility, ethics, aesthetics and documentation intersect.