What Photography & Incarceration Have In Common With An Empty Vase

 It is a multifaceted body of work, commissioned by GRAIN Projects, where Edgar Martins uses the social context of incarceration as a starting point. Martins explores the philosophical concept of absence.

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.  


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.   

These images represent a selection of knives and other bladed weapons analysed by the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, which were used in serious crimes over a period of two years. 

However, for Martins these blades do not necessarily just talk of violence and crime. They are not mere still-lives. They are portraits, stand-ins for the individuals that once held them. They depict different individual dispositions, body shapes and temperaments

 This installation comprises a mixture of historical archive photographs as well as personal photographs donated by the inmates and families Martins interacted with. The book that supports the visual work is a facsimile copy of an inmate’s diary, which was written especially for this project.  

Martins forged a close friendship with the inmate that wrote this journal, visiting him over two years.

HMP Birmingham enabled the artist to spend one-on-one time with the inmate in question, allowing the artist to share the work he was producing with him and edit the diary.  

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. 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.