Edgar Martins Wins New York Photo Award for Personal/Fine Art Series
During the inaugural New York Photo Festival in DUMBO, New York, Edgar Martins was awarded a New York Photo Award for Personal/Fine Art Series. Click here to see a list of the other winners.
Aperture asked Martins to reflect on his recent win and to discuss the winning images from the series, The Accidental Theorist, which are featured in his new monograph and Aperture magazine, issue 184. Select limited-editions from the series are also available here and here. Martins discusses life and photography below:
Untitled, from the series The Accidental Theorist, 2005
I have always found photography to be a highly inadequate medium for communicating ideas, a subject and object of lack, if you like. However, it is this anxiety with the medium that spurs me on to find a new visual language to work with and, I suppose, a new vocabulary from which to derive my glossary of life. ‘The Accidental Theorist’, the series which was recently awarded the inaugural New York Photo Award (Personal/Fine Art Series) deals with many of these issues. I am extremely honored to have received this award, not only because it is one of the most sought awards in the industry but also because it is a recognition of all the hard work, which I and those around me (such as Aperture, which I have a lot to thank for) have invested into my practice over the last few years.
Untitled, from the series The Accidental Theorist, 2007
It is not easy to get a foothold in today’s art world so it gives me great satisfaction to have been adopted by its establishment. I have come a long way since my first ever exhibition at Macau’s Civic Centre Exhibition Hall (China). I have come to develop a completely different relationship with the medium and have also redefined my relationship with the world (as it is expected from someone who is growing up – I was only 17 when I organized this exhibition and published my first book).
Saying this, Macau has played an instrumental part in the person I am today. Having split my existence between 2/3 countries, I no longer feel rooted anywhere. And this provides me with enough critical distancing to interiorize the spaces I live in, in an objective and pragmatic fashion, and to study my ever-changing surroundings. Urbanism has always played a part in my work.
In many of my projects I have developed I have portrayed urbanism as a movement of isolation, emphasizing the notion that we are no longer able to understand the de-centered city, its signs or the language that it yields. Take Macau, for example, it is changing at a fast pace. I once came across a small book by Salmon Rushdie about the movie the Wizard of Oz, which finished with these words, and I quote: ‘it is not that there is no place like home, there is no longer any such thing as home’. This really resonated with me.
This is present in my artistic practice and in my overall attitude towards the world. It is all encompassing. New York (and this is why winning the New York Photo Award was important to me) represents another phase of my life, another city which I hope to get to know better, produce a great deal more work in and who knows perhaps even settle in one day. But not indefinitely. At this point in time I am not seeking decisive encounters. All is flux and all is flow. Actually, to paraphrase Carlo McCormick: ‘In a world where everything has validity it is the indecisive encounters, which have become the decisive act.’
Untitled, from the series The Accidental Theorist, 2005
