At night, an airport apron becomes something other than a workplace. Floodlights and moonlight fall across tarmac, painted signs and runway markings, and the familiar ground of aviation turns strange. When Light Casts No Shadow gathers Edgar Martins’s photographs of European airports to which he was granted special airside access, several of them on the Azores, an archipelago that served as a compulsory stop for transatlantic flights before 1970 and as a military base in both World Wars.

Almost every image was made at night, with exposures running from ten minutes to two hours, sometimes doubled. The publisher describes images combining a long depth of field with minimal lighting. Sky and ground can merge until only the airport’s own signals orient us. In the Azores, black-tarred runways—among the very few in the world—set up a charged relation with fluorescent paint and markings, and some of the most arresting pictures hold that relation at their centre.

Here is a landscape of signs meant for pilots and air traffic controllers, and opaque to nearly everyone else. Where old and new markings overlap, the language ruptures and time folds in on itself. The book’s subject is therefore not aviation as such but the ambiguity of meaning, the way a system of signs can be both precise and illegible. The volume includes an interview by Gerry Badger.

The book is published by Dewi Lewis in a clothbound hardback of 84 pages, with 53 colour plates and dimensions of 27 by 33.5 centimetres. That scale suits images whose legibility depends on detail, and the project explores the visual possibilities of long nocturnal exposures. For a collector drawn to photography that treats infrastructure as abstraction—and to the specific problem of how light writes and erases a place—this is a considered addition: a study of the uncertain boundary between functional information and visual abstraction.