Produced in the final year of his MA degree in Photography and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art (London), Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies was conceived in response to Martins’ research on the theme of the metastization of the urban frontier and its impact on our understanding of the de-centred city.
Title: Black holes & other inconsistencies
Year: 2002
Country: United Kingdom
Width (mm): 255
Height (mm): 285
Cover type: Hardcover
Bind types: Perfect Binding
Print types:
General notes: ‘If we’re no longer able to define what a city is, how are we to relate to it?’, asks Martins. Produced almost entirely in peripheral regions in South-East China, Portugal and South Africa, Martins uses the ‘black hole’ in the landscape as a metaphor for reason at a point of exhaustion. Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies highlights a point of resistance: resistance to the world of flux and flow that we live in; to a world haunted by mobility, intangibility and uncertainty.
Content notes: Black holes conjure up associations of darkness, obscurity and loss of meaning. The black hole in this image is an unexpected fiction, turning a barren landscape into a stage and twisting the traditional premise of photography as truthful. Taking his lead from the physicist Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle', which claims that things only exist if and when they are observed, Edgar Martins explores the relationship between landscape, photography and reality.