What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase

What Photography & Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase is a two-part photobook by UK-based Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins, created in collaboration with inmates at a prison in England’s Midlands region. In this densely packed project, Martins wrestles with crucial questions about the representation of the experience of incarceration. The two volumes are packaged together in a plastic police evidence bag. One of the volumes is the facsimile of pages from an incarcerated person’s diary; handwritten entries express the frustrations and anxieties of undergoing trial and daily life in prison, occasionally layered with a photograph or drawing by either the author or Martins. “The complementary volume sets up an uneasy juxtaposition,” Meister cautions—opening up questions of truth and fiction, or the equivalences between shooting a camera and a gun. Martins brings together a heady mix of studio and archival images, documents, and other interventions “to complicate or render impossible any simple read of the subject,” Meister observes.