photography in all its forms

"We have our own special skills and she is a computer whiz and I work on the sets. We bounce the ideas around—she works upstairs and I, in the basement—and we meet up for lunch and dinner to talk about what we’re doing. The most important part of the collaboration for me is in the informative stage when we are trying to articulate nebulous ideas and give them some shape."—Walter Martin

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz work collaboratively to create mesmerizing miniature snowbound environments, then record them in vivid color photographs. At first glance the work is playful; on closer observation, it often reveals darker narratives: lone wanderers survey the frigid landscape, and people and creatures exhibit unnatural tendencies. The photograph Wide Open Waiting is from their second series of work, Islands. Transitioning from their first, widely acclaimed series, in which their work was sequenced and created in miniature within the simple constraints of snow globes, the work in Islands expands to a larger tableaux. Both series are published in a monograph titled Travelers (Aperture, October 2008).

Martin and Muñoz create the figures, either adapting ready-made figurines or shaping them out of clay. Martin works on the sets, painting and positioning the figures in constructed environments. The final compositions are captured in photographs by Muñoz, which are meticulously stitched and adjusted digitally for the final effect. On these Islands, "odd mutations can happen" says Martin in a recent interview. "We are trying to find things that surprise us; that have a critical combination of tragedy and comedy in our world we set the parameters for. The whole body of work was generated from a culture shock that we went through when we moved from New York to the countryside....Eventually the woods and the countryside weren’t as inviting and pleasant as we’d imagined them. We discovered a lot of things we found disturbing...hearing gunshots in the forest, having seen bears, almost stepping on a snake in the forest...The snow globes were close-ups, sort of narrative snippets involving interactions between people and nature, whereas, with the panoramas, the people are integrated into nature. It has a pantheistic feeling where there is a democratic quality between the forces of nature and people being just part of the forces of nature." The novelist Jonathan Lethem, who contributed a short story to the artist’s recent monograph, says of their work in an interview with the New York Times, "I always gravitate to it. It consistently combines reality and fantasy and puts an emphasis on storytelling as a universal form of human self-understanding."

In,this special limited-edition print offering of Wide Open Waiting, these "travelers" are seen with suitcases, traipsing through a snowy winter wonderland with a twist. Lost in direction, looking up into the sky, and seemingly waiting....What they wait for lies in the imagination of both the artists and their audience.

Signed and numbered by the artists.