Published by Post Editions in 2012, Peter Martens’s American Testimony brings a posthumous project by the Dutch photographer into book form. Martens (1937–1992) was known for street photography rooted in the American tradition of socially engaged, personal documentary practice. Rather than treating that tradition as detached observation, he used it to identify with people living at society’s margins and to confront circumstances that resist comfortable interpretation.

The book’s significance lies as much in its position within Martens’s working process as in its individual photographs. During the final period of his life, he was composing two books from what he considered the strongest work in his oeuvre: American Testimony and Few Loving Voices. He prepared dummies and selected more than 400 prints for the two projects. Those materials remained in the Nederlands Fotomuseum archive until the books were published after his death.

That history makes American Testimony more than a retrospective survey assembled at a distance. It derives from Martens’s own sustained attempt to translate a substantial body of work into sequences, establishing relations among street encounters, social conditions and human vulnerability. The resulting publication preserves photography not simply as an accumulation of forceful images, but as an argument shaped through editing and order. Its directness is inseparable from an ethical stance: Martens asks the viewer to look at lives and situations that conventional representation can render peripheral.

A text by Dutch writer Renate Dorrestein adds another layer to the project. Dorrestein had worked with Martens during her career as a journalist, giving the collaboration a basis in shared professional experience rather than retrospective commentary alone. For collectors concerned with documentary photography and the photobook as an authored form, American Testimony merits attention for this convergence of social commitment, photographer-led sequencing and posthumous archival realization. It records how Martens intended his work to function between individual image and book-length statement.