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WHAT PHOTOGRAPHY
& INCARCERATION
HAVE IN COMMON WITH AN EMPTY VASE
BY EDGAR MARTINS
––––––––––––––––
FINAL COPIES
––––––––––––––––
November 2019
Twin publication + 1 film
170x230mm & 151x221mm
Softback & Hardback
Enclosed in genuine prison bag
English
Essay by Mark Durden
Edition of 300 + collector's edition of 100
£60/€67/$75
ISBN 978-0-9569085-4-4
What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase is Edgar Martins' most ambitious and experimental project to date.
This multifaceted body of work was developed, over a period of 3 years, with Grain Projects and HM Prison Birmingham (the largest, category B prison in the Midlands, UK), and in particular its inmates, their families as well as a myriad of other individuals and organisations (charities, colleges, universities, youth centres, etc.)
Using the social context of incarceration as a starting point, Martins explores the philosophical concept of absence, and addresses a broader consideration of the status of the photograph when questions of visibility, ethics, aesthetics and documentation intersect.
By productively articulating image and text, new and historical photography, evidence and fiction, Martins’ work proposes to scrutinise how one deals with the absence of a loved one, brought on by enforced separation. From an ontological perspective it seeks answers to the following questions: how does one represent a subject that eludes visualization, that is absent or hidden from view? How can documentary photography, in an era of fake news, best acknowledge the imaginative and fictional dimension of our relation to photographs?
By giving a voice to inmates and their families and addressing prison as a set of social relations rather than a mere physical space, Martins’ work proposes to rethink and counter the sort of imagery normally associated with incarceration.
The project, thus, wilfully circumvents images whose sole purpose, Martins argues, is to confirm the already held opinions within dominant ideology about crime & punishment: violence, drugs, criminality, race – an approach that only serves to reinforce the act of photographing and photography itself as apotropaic devices.
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