A highly personal project following the death in Libya of a fellow photographer has seen a Bedford-based visual artist awarded Sony World Photographer of the Year 2023.
Edgar Martins, originally from Portugal and brought up in Macau, China, was nominated in the Portrait category at this year’s prestigious Sony World Photography Awards.
The competition attracted almost half a million submissions, with 180,000 alone in the Portrait category.
The ceremony, held at the Park Lane Hilton in London on Thursday 13 April, hosted guests and nominees from around the world, celebrating the pinnacle of photography.
After winning the Portrait category, Edgar was among 10 category winners in line for the overall award and the $25,000 prize fund.
“You enter competitions like this but are conscious it is someone’s subjective decision, so you enter and forget about it,” Edgar, who lives in the Black Tom area, told the Bedford Independent.
“When it was announced that I had won, it all happened very quickly and I was whisked away for all sorts of media. It’s been a bit non-stop ever since.”
The winning portraits are part of a wider project called Our War that Edgar has been working on alongside a Phd which looks at the representation of conflict and how documentary photography operates in a warzone.
Speaking to Bored Panda, Edgar said:
“Our War is a previously unseen series of images produced over a period of 3 years in Libya and North Africa that forms part of an overarching project symptomatically titled ‘Anton’s hand is made of guilt. No muscle or bone. He has two clinically depressed fingers and an angry thumb’.
“It uses as a jumping-off point a speculative investigation into the death and disappearance of a close friend of mine, the photojournalist Anton Hammerl, during the 2011 Libyan war.
“As his mortal remains are missing to this day, I set out to produce a project inspired by his story but also rooted in a very simple premise: how does one tell a story when there is no witness, no testimony, no evidence, no subject?
“Moreover, how does one grieve in the absence of all these things? By retracing Anton’s steps, some of the places he visited, the place where he met his end, by engaging with people involved in the conflict and others enacting their stories, by finding meaningful intersections between both our journeys and understanding the motivations behind his, I was able to step into his shoes, even if momentarily.
“Notwithstanding, this project is about much more than honouring my dear friend.
“It portrays a complex story, warped by absences, that talks of the difficulty of documenting, testifying, witnessing, remembering, and imagining.
“This project explores new visual representational methods and techniques to interrogate conflict and trauma and enable innovative approaches to respond to war, photographic ethics and dealing with bereavement, loss and missing persons.”
A tribute to Anton
Using analogue film, Edgar travelled to Libya and North Africa to create a project of “memories created from experiences and from the imagination”.
“It’s a tribute to Anton and it’s also a reflection on the propensity of documentary photography to disavow its subjects – often the power relationship between photographer and subject means that the subject has no control.
“I use analogue film, so I have learned to relinquish control,” said Edgar.
The hugely complex and over-arching project will be completed next year when it forms a large exhibition at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon in Edgar’s home country of Portugal.
“It’s going to be a big show with a big production budget,” explained Edgar. “It will then go on tour to other locations and there will be a book to accompany the exhibition.”
In addition, images from the project will be part of the Sony Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House in London in 2024.
