What Photography & Incarceration
Have In Common With An Empty Vase
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
15 January - 18 April 2021
What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase results from a collaboration between artist Edgar Martins and prison inmates in the West Midlands, their families and several other individuals and community groups in the region.
It is a multifaceted body of work, developed from a commission with GRAIN Projects, where Martins uses the social context of incarceration as a starting point. Martins explores the philosophical concept of absence. He also addresses a broader consideration of the status of the photograph when questions of visibility, ethics, aesthetics and documentation intersect.
By using 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 through incarceration and lockdown.
The exhibition seeks to answer: How does one represent a subject 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 physical space, Martins’ work aims to rethink and counter the sort of imagery normally associated with incarceration and confinement. The project intentionally circumvents images whose sole purpose, Martins argues, is to confirm the already held opinions within dominant ideology about crime and punishment: violence, drugs, criminality and race.
“We need to rethink the set of practices, relationships, and structures with which we look and relate to photographs according to Martins and for this rethinking he skews photography away from a preoccupation with the referent.
The work still comes from experience and engagement with inmates, incarcerated in the West Midlands, and their families, and is not detached from the real. However, Martins does not hold faith in the power of the photograph as document and instead uses the literal figuratively and moves with freedom and a lack of restraint through the abundance of images and image types he deploys.”
- Mark Durden, Against Documentary in What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase, The Moth House, 2019
One of Martins’ priorities, while engaging with prisoners and their families, was to tell the stories and narratives that seldom get told, while also protecting them from the gaze of the public. It became apparent to Martins early on in the project that many of the individuals he had connected with were highly vulnerable, particularly the family members.
While Martins photographed offenders, ex-offenders and their relatives he also photographed people (actors) enacting their stories. This methodology was employed so one would never know who is being referred to. According to Martins this strategy enabled him to disrupt the power relations and the voyeurism inherent in the consumption of this type of imagery. Martins went to great lengths to invert the role of the sitter. The people one might imagine to play a specific role, may not actually have this role in real life.
‘Sky Blue’
from the series What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase,
2019
The blue rectangle featured in this artwork is printed directly on the glass and so ‘floats’ above the artwork. The paint itself is applied using a special serigraphy process Martins developed. It uses the same kind of paint that is normally applied in stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals.
This photograph is a homage to an inmate Martins met at Birmingham prison, who was purported to have the darkest cell. Although he had requested a transfer to a different cell on multiple occasions, the prison authorities were reluctant to move him as he had a reputation for being very disruptive.
Resigned that he would have to spend the rest of his 10-year sentence in this dark room, he asked his family to smuggle in a yellow felt tip pen during their monthly family visits. Stationery can often be used as weapons in prison, however, in this case the pens were not used for nefarious purposes. For over a year he collected enough pens to paint his cell window a ‘sunset yellow’ colour.
Once he finished painting this window he started collecting smuggled, blue felt tip pens.
The inmate admitted to Martins that one day he would eventually be forced to clean the yellow painted window or that the prison authorities would replace it so he was already preparing his move.
He would paint the new window ‘sky blue’. The landscape depicted in this artwork was shot in the Everglades, where he vacationed with his family prior to being incarcerated.
During the three-year gestation of this project, Martins developed a close relationship with numerous individuals and organisations outside the prison walls, namely mental health charities, youth centres and youth groups and the relatives of inmates.
One day, he was invited by one of the families to attend a psychoanalytical session being offered to one of their children. This clinic was part of a programme launched by a local mental health charity that supported the relatives of prisoners struggling with the incarceration of their partners.
‘No Man is an Island’
from the series What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase, 2019
This artwork is based on the observations Martins made from one of the psychoanalysis sessions Martins attended. The bird represents the father of the child (in her dreams), the girl eating the bird represents the daughter ‘appropriating’ the memory of her father. The mouth in psychoanalytical literature is often seen as an eye, so 'the mouth as an eye' references the daughter constructing an identity for her father, in his absence.
“Our relation to photography has been very much determined by its content: a concern with what is in the picture and how what is in the picture has been represented.
In many respects Martins frees us from this responsibility: his use of all kinds of photography liberates us from the usual strictures with which we tend to approach the photograph— documentary especially can be a very sober form— and in doing so extends the differing potentialities and possibilities that photographs (still) have to engage and move us.”
— Mark Durden, Against Documentary in What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase, The Moth House, 2019
![[Image Description: A range of logos, including GRAIN, Arts Council England, Republica Portugesa, dg Artes, VIDEOLAB, Camoes Instituto Da Cooperacao E Da Lingua Portugal, Here For Culture, The Moth House, and Birmingham City University.]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ff712fd67a5a02a5d531f25/1610619444937-0L1DXJ1ZEOLXNKDT0WQP/wphicwaev+logos.jpg)
#emptyphotocov | edgarmartins.com
The digital exhibition has been curated by Joy Corcec.