ABSTRACT
A close discussion of three projects by the British-based, Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins. Martins is an artist who combines a grandeur of visual form with a conceptual or philosophical distance. His work has the intensity of both picturing and thinking. His subjects are the urban and regional landscapes of the new economies and industries, the local emanations of the global system; the “everywhereness” of some places. They recall Marc Augé’s “non-places”. It has pictured the unfinished, upmarket McMansions and condos left unsold or abandoned in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, visualising in complex and oblique ways both the material consequences of the toxic economy and the abstractions of the system that produced it. Martins has produced work of almost epical vision of industrial plants both ageing and new. In his portrayal of the luminous BMW plant in Munich, Martins presents the viewer with a system of industrial production of sublime precision and cool beauty that seems to aspire to dispense with human presence completely. And yet, at the edges of the grandness Martins has always found unplanned strangeness, in the accidental disposition of often small objects, the effects of light and darkness, occasionally making constructions himself out of what he finds. There is also a sense of unease in his work that takes his picturings beyond their obvious content. Martins raises questions concerning the relationship between the photograph as document, as formal composition, and as conceptual practice. For these reasons and others, Martins’ photography is a significant body of work presenting to us the condition we inhabit, and the practice we utilise to picture it.
