In late 2008, as the fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis became increasingly widely felt, the New York Times Magazine commissioned Edgar Martins to photograph across the United States in eight separate states and sixteen different locations. These carefully researched sites exposed the extent and impact of the crisis on the US construction industry. The resulting images are gathered in This Is Not A House, published by Dewi Lewis in 2011, with essays by Sacha Craddock and Peter D. Osborne.
Martins approached the project as a photographic intervention into a crisis, and the 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 Ranciere states, the real can only be unravelled and understood if it is first fictionalised; the real must be transformed to be understood. The houses depicted 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.
The book 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.
Internationally recognised, Edgar Martins has won several awards for his work including Portugal’s BES Photography Award, the UK’s National Media Museum Terry O’Neil Award, and a Jerwood Photography Prize. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and has published several books, the two most recent being Topologies (Aperture) and When Light Casts No Shadow (Dewi Lewis Publishing). This Is Not A House is a quarter bound hardback of 108 pages, 265mm by 335mm, containing 65 colour photographs.
