This Is Not a House - Hardcover

Edgar Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1907893024 ISBN 13: 9781907893025

Publisher: Dewi Lewis Ltd, 2011

Synopsis

The US subprime mortgage crisis, which had its roots in the closing years of the twentieth century, exposed pervasive weaknesses in the regulation of the financial industry and the global financial system. At the end of 2008, as the fall-out from the crisis became increasingly widely felt, Edgar Martins was commissioned by the New York Times Magazine to photograph across the US in eight separate states and across sixteen different locations. These carefully researched sites exposed the extent and impact of the crisis on the US construction industry. Martins approached the project as a photographic intervention into a crisis and the resulting images go beyond pure formal investigation or documentation. His interest lay in summoning a disquieting conjunction of realism and fiction by cutting into the real . As the writer Jacques Ranciére states, the real can only be unravelled and understood if it is first fictionalised. And so the real must be transformed to be understood. The houses depicted in this series do not refer to just the particular. They are images of spatial assemblages, of kinds of stages on which a number of quite different (and perhaps incompatible) narratives might be enacted. These images, these houses, these ruins, reflect back at us the human constructs that we project and impose on them. This Is Not A House emerges precisely at that juncture where clear words falter, where language is disturbed. The meaning of the world is no longer carried on its surface, if indeed it ever was.

About this title

About the Author

Edgar Martins. Edgar Martins was born in Évora, Portugal, in 1977. He grew up in Macau, China. He now lives and works in London, England.
He has won numerous awards, including:
The inaugural Jerwood Photography Award UK, 2003
New York Photography Award (Fine Art Category) USA, 2008
The prestigious BES Photo Prize, (2009)
SONY World Photography Awards 2nd place 2009
Terry O'Neil Award 2009
Finalist of the Prix Pictet 2009
1st prize at the International Photography Awards (Fine Art, Abstract Category) 2010

Topologies, published by Aperture Books in 2008, was met with critical acclaim. This work has toured internationally at PS1 MoMA (New York), Museu Oriente (Lisbon), Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro) and included in photography festivals such as Format (UK), Lodz (Poland), Lianzhou (China), Art Algarve (Portugal), Foto DC Week (Washington], amongst many others.
When Light Casts no Shadow was published by Dewi Lewis in December 2009 and exhibited at Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon); Galerie Caprice Horn (Berlin); Porta33 (Madeira), Galerie Melanie Rio, Nantes (France), amongst others.

His work is held in various high profile collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), National Media Museum (Bradford), Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, FMPLJ Foundation, Ilídio Pinho Foundation, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas, Centro de Artes Visuais de Coimbra and Bes Art (Portugal); Dallas Museum of Art (USA), amongst many others. Martins' work is also featured in several private and corporate collections.

Sacha Craddock. Sacha Craddock is an independent art critic and curator. The chair of Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and former Turner Prize (1999) and Jerwood Painting Prize (2001) judge. Craddock is also a former critic for both The Guardian and The Times. She writes numerous articles and catalogue essays, gives public lectures and makes television appearances.

Peter D. Osborne. Peter D. Osborne is a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies and in the History and Theory of Photography in the Faculty of Media at the London College of Communication, a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. He is the author of Travelling Light, photography, travel and visual culture, Manchester University Press, and of a number of articles, papers and catalogue essays on photography and landscape; art, photography and travel; and on Latin America photography.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dewi Lewis Ltd
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1907893024
• ISBN 13: 9781907893025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 108