Edgar Martins: What Photography and Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase, The Moth House, London 2019

Is there a way to work with inmates and their families on incarceration, investigating not so much the physical conditions of confinement but the related emotional impact? How can we talk about imprisonment differently and not use the predominant narration and traditional power relations? How to respond and communicate with photographs? This set of questions seems to unfold in the material that Edgar Martins has assembled in the multilayered project What Photography and Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase,¹ which questions the possible significance of the photographic image in its relation to the “real.”

The bundle of the publication project includes a (business) card showing a QR code and two precious books held together with a rubber ring. The code leads to Edgar Martins’s twenty-minute black-and-white film The Life and Death of Schrodinger’s Cat (2019), offering a fictional gateway into the subject of imprisonment. The script (developed in collaboration with the CERN scientist João Seixas) is set in the 1950s in England’s Midlands, where the two secret state projects “QSafe” and “CryoGuard” were experimenting with making the penal system invisible. Together with archival photographic material, derived for instance from CERN, The Sun, LIFE Magazine, or the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), the film plays with an elaborate scientific aesthetic, animated by the moving camera.

Wrapped in an evidence bag is the black hardcover book, with handwritten cream-colored letters faking print typography, titled What Photography Incarceration Has in Common with an Empty Vase. Here, Edgar Martins collaborated with an inmate of the HM Prison Birmingham, a middle-aged man sentenced for dealing drugs, and published several of his diaries from his period of incarceration. The facsimile shows the man’s handwriting and includes inserted folded pages with children’s drawings. From time to time, the writing is overlaid with black and- white photographs on a metalevel associ- sysated with the subject. Three hundred and twelve pages of strong testimony familiarize the reader with the dehumanizing conditions of incarceration, revealing loneliness, colorlessness, and existential fears.

The red softcover book titled What Photography Has in Common with an Empty Vase starts with an essay arguing “Against Documentary,” understood as “one for which the referent is important” (p. 9), by the professor, writer, and artist Mark Durden. This is followed by an inserted six-page handwritten note, in which the inmate summarizes his feelings, sharing the different shades of being mentally fragile. On roughly two hundred pages, the beholder flips through various categories of photographic responses °—again in collaboration with inmates: (overworked) archival images, some depicting bizarre enigmatic scenes, a cap labeled “MAKE MEN GREAT AGAIN” and a few pages later an image showing this cap starting to burn, a cigarette pack stickered with “ABSENCE DOESNT FUCKING MAKE THE HEART GO FONDER,” findings from the prison such as a wristband, personal notes or letters, a few portraits with (or without) evidence of physical harm set against a rose-hued or light-blue background, staged photographs which might have been taken against the prison wall, and much more. Throughout the different categories, the images question their relation to reality, and an uneasy feeling of emptiness and loss keeps coming back. The photographs function “metaphorically and are intended to allude to certain psychological states and situations” (p. 10). Edgar Martins added another layer and employed playful elements to further test the different relations between absence and presence: the beholder finds different aspects of hiding in foldout plates, semi-transparent papers, pages with little punched-out squares, and so on. Through means such as fictionalizing, staging, overworking, taking away, and replacing the referent, Edgar Martins enhances the understanding of the photographic image and its relation not only to incarceration but to the world.