‘I saw right away that he was not there’

Edgar Martins, Anton’s Hand is Made of Guilt. No Muscle or Bone. He has a Gung-ho Finger and a Grief-stricken Thumb, The Moth House, 2024

Date: 2024
ISBN: 978-0-9569085-5-1
Dimensions: 208x260mm
Pages: 300
Edition: 400
Softback
English & Arabic
Essays by David Campany & Will Self

Book available here

Anton’s hand is made of guilt. No muscle of bone. He has a Gung-ho Finger and a Grief-stricken Thumb. is a research-based documentary project, a novel, a journal, a lipogramme and an imaginary anthropological study in one.

It is a multifaceted body of work, which includes original photographs, archival photography and images researched from private Islamist, Libyan and dark web forums. It is also accompanied by album of probing soundscapes exploring the everyday experiences of a war correspondent as well as a book of drawings of war scenes (collector’s edition).

Developed in north Africa from 2019-2023, this part-documentary, part-speculative project is based on a poignant and very personal story and experience: the death and disappearance of Edgar Martins’ close friend, photojournalist Anton Hammerl, during the 2011 Libyan war. The book responds to Anton Hammerl’s disappearance/death through an examination of the geography, players and circumstances surrounding his demise as well as a reflection on the decisive but paradoxical role that photography has played in conflict zones.

Through a meta-representational approach that looks beyond the referent – which Martins terms ‘impossible document’ – this publication represents an ambitious attempt to develop a visual lexicon that can be used as a representational and pedagogic tool to interrogate and document modern conflict as well as the spectacle of photojournalism.

About the Author
Edgar Martins is visual artist woking across different media. His work is represented in several high-profile collections, such as those of the V&A, RIBA, the Dallas Museum of Art; MAST , MUDAS, Modern Art Centre Lisbon, MAAT, Fondation Carmignac, amongst others. He has published over 16 books which were met with critical acclaim and exhibited internationally. He was selected to represent Macau (China) at the 54th Venice Biennale.

About the Writers
David Campany is a curator, writer, and Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography, New York. For his writing, he has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, the Alice Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society award.

Will Self is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing.

 

I Saw Right Away that He Was Not There’

by David Campany

In 1962, Michelangelo Antonioni concluded his film L’Eclisse with one of the most sublime and troubling codas in all cinema. The protagonists in the story are a couple in the midst of a slowly disintegrating love affair. Almost exhausted, they agree to yet another rendezvous. Alle otto. Solito posto. (Eight o’clock. Usual place.) The film fades to black, then fades up in that place, and we see once again the streets and the buildings we have come to know over the previous two hours. Antonioni cuts between almost static details. A curb. A tree. A wall. Slowly, a doubt arises. The couple may not have kept their promise to show up here, but the film has. The film is present, and so are we. Invested, hopeful, anticipating. Pregnant with open meaning, the shots continue. A traffic sign. A window. A parked car. The sequence goes on far longer than we are used to in cinema. Several minutes. Water dripping. A lawn. Another tree. Each shot comes with its ambient sound. No dialogue, no music.  Finally, we must accept that there is nothing to anticipate. The couple will not appear. Instead, we are left to contemplate their absence, the void of their world. They are elsewhere, and in all likelihood they are not together. We are here, in their former place, imagining the couple’s separate places. Three geographies. Four, if we include wherever we are watching the film. Have the couple left an impression here where they used to meet, or is the impression merely upon our memory? Will the memory fade?

This may seem a strange place to begin a set of reflections on Edgar Martins’ project Anton’s Hand is Made of Guilt. No Muscle or Bone. He has a Gung-ho Finger and a Grief-stricken Thumb. Nevertheless, it is what came to mind when he first showed it to me. On the floor of my sitting room in east London, Edgar patiently laid out the many small prints in a provisional sequence that eventually would become the book you are holding. One by one, he placed them in rows, unfolding before my eyes like a cinematic montage of discrete elements. Several types of imagery and details – some grouped together, some overlapping – began to appear. I watched in silence. “I don’t know what I need to tell you,” he said.

“You don’t need to tell me anything, but tell me what you want to tell me.”

“Well, there’s a search, for a person, my friend Anton Hammerl, a photojournalist who was killed in the 2011 Libyan civil war. No grave and no body have been found. I went looking. But there’s also a photographic search. A search not just for images but for what we want from images… the promises they make… at some point these searches became inseparable for me… Anton was gone… there would be images… maybe of him… maybe of people like him… of places and situations he had been in or might have been in. People he knew.  I could go there, and also I could look online. So that’s what I did. And now all these many parts are coming together.”

I suddenly realised that although Edgar’s varied practice has taken many directions over the years, it has always been a search, or a double-search: for an elusive subject and for the elusive heart of photography. It is a medium he loves and mistrusts, but he cannot walk away from it. (Perhaps this is what photography is for so many of us). Even the titles of his projects and books, stretching back over more than two decades, signal this searching. Black Holes and Other Inconsistencies. The Diminishing Present. When Light Casts no Shadow. The Wayward Line. This is not a House. The Time Machine. The Rehearsal of Space & The Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite. Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes. What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase. I could go on.

So, maybe it wasn’t such a leap to be thinking of the end of Antonioni’s film. It makes us believe in people until we cannot, then makes us believe in images until we cannot. And we go on needing both. Edgar tells me of the point at which his search for Anton’s remains came to an end. The trail simply ran dry, but he could not stop. He bought mobile phones on the Libyan second-hand market that might have had memory cards with images of the conflict. He photographed places Anton was known to have been in at one point or another. Rooms. Trees in the desert. Edgar entered the ‘dark web,’ searching countless unnamed folders for images of the civil war, and of Anton.

As more and more of the sequence was elaborated across my floor, it became clear that Anton was not going to materialise, but something else was emerging. We might call it the form of an absence, or the outline of a desire, or even the shape of a trauma. For all photography’s claims to disclose, to show, what we think of as ‘the real’ is always that which escapes comprehension, and so escapes representation. The real is the absence, the desire, the trauma. The real is not so much the goal of a search as its motivation. It initiates the search. The real is the jolt to go looking. Edgar laid out more images (it is a big book, as you now know) and involuntarily I recalled a vivid passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:

I have an appointment with Peter at four o’clock. I arrive at the café a quarter of an hour late. Peter is always on time. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room and I say, “He is not here.” Is there an intuition of the absence of Peter, or does the negation come only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak of intuition here, since there cannot be an intuition of nothing, and since the absence of Peter is precisely this nothing. Everyday language, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, “I saw right away that he was not there”?

That’s twice already that my mind had drifted from Edgar’s sequence and from the Anton I never knew. Was this unethical, given the seriousness of the subject matter? I’ve learned to trust such drifts, so I mention them both to Edgar. He has not seen L’Eclisse and the Sartre passage is new to him, but he grasps the resonance and makes mental notes. We talk about the value of metaphors, and how they help us to understand things like searches, and the factual enigmas of photographs that seduce, or entice, or shock while being unable to tell us what we most want to know. Metaphors are there to help, until they do not, or until we do not need them.

Looking closely at the rows of images, my mind drifted yet again. In every generation, a film adaptation is made of HG Wells’ classic story, The Invisible Man. In one of these adaptations there is a street scene where wind whips up lots of bits of paper and blows them against the body we cannot see. Suddenly we can make out his outline. I suggest to Edgar that this too might be a metaphor, perhaps for his approach, perhaps for the absent Anton. On this point Edgar grows silent for a moment, but replies to it later, via email:

I really like the idea of the images, work, narrative and things depicted in the images being the leaves that form the shape. But then I also recalled that scene from American Beauty, you know the one, with the guy’s home movies of things blowing in the wind (plastic bags and leaves, if I recall…). I was thinking that as beautiful as the metaphor is, leaves on the floor seem somewhat unimportant and aleatory and to some degree random and fleeting. So, if the work and everything in it is the leaves, I’d probably say they are very specific leaves. Maybe the leaves that have fallen from one of the trees I photographed, that mark the places where atrocities took place or that guide people through the desert, or the hill Anton died on, or that covered the mass grave he was purported to have been buried in. I suppose what I mean is that as much thought went into selecting the people and places I did photograph as those I chose not to, disavowed or found ‘surrogates’ for. I hope that makes sense… Even behind every seemingly unrelated or random web photo there was a concrete intent to search for a photo of Anton. Of course, there are elements in the work that are a tad more aleatory. I’m thinking specifically of the found photos. What resonated to me with these is that there is also a search of some kind that underpins them and which intersects with that particular time and place. Above and beyond this there are images specifically inserted into the work that are only there to destabilise our reading and the certainties we demand of the act of looking. But these are few and far between and the goal with these is primarily to question our convictions and expectations.

There is little doubt this project is Edgar’s most personal. The kernel of its unrepresentable real, the death of a friend in unknown but hostile circumstances, is something he has felt acutely, perhaps the to the point of unsettlement or even delirium at times. But this is not a fully private matter. Many people want to know what happened to Anton, and to others. And all of us want to know how to conduct a search, especially when there is no certain way of doing it.

I could have begun my writing here another way,  perhaps with the idea of documentary, but even then we would soon be facing these same challenges. The term documentary is misleading, but it shouldn’t be. The Scottish film-maker John Grierson is credited with coining the word back in 1928. He described is as “The creative treatment of actuality with a social purpose.” Just eight years later, in his 1936 essay ‘Popularity and Realism’, the anti-fascist writer and cultural critic Bertolt Brecht laid out the urgent and difficult task of representing an increasingly unpredictable world:

With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not […] derive realism as such from particular existing works, but we shall use every means, old and new, tried and untried, derived from art and derived from other sources, to render reality to men in a form they can master. […] Our concept of realism must be wide and political, sovereign over all conventions.[i]

In other words, Grierson and Brecht understood documentary and realism as necessarily experimental practices, riven by complexities and unknowns which ought to be embraced as generative. Documentary and realism require guesswork, speculation. In other words, they are arts. They require risk and not just from the maker, but from audiences. Form is not to be assumed upfront and simply applied to subject matter. Rather, form has to be found and fought for in the midst of the search. (There is an important parallel here with the origins of the essay, a kind of writing understood from the outset as necessarily risky and without fixed form. We derive the English word ‘essay’ from the French ‘essayer’: to try; to try out.)

Brecht was writing during the rise of European fascism, but also in the year of the founding of Life, the North American illustrated weekly current affairs magazine that, perhaps more than the many others, squeezed out the experimental basis of documentary and realism. In the hands of the mass media and the populist press, documentary and realism were streamlined to a formula reliant on spectacle, sentimentalism and voyeurism – easy for audiences to consume, almost passively. There was plenty of resistance to this, sometimes from within the mass media itself, but mostly from the margins. Then, as the power of the magazines dwindled (Life finally folded in 1972), television took over with its own formulas for documentary and realism. These reigned until the break-up of broadcast TV by the bespoke media consumerism of the internet age. Although it doesn’t often feel like it, one blessing of this has been a returning of documentary and realism to their experimental roots. There is no longer a default form and as a result there is a more open attitude to what documentary can be, needs to be, albeit with more limited outlets.

We can certainly see the recent renaissance of the experimental documentary photobook in these terms, the innovations of which have even influenced the illustrated press that survives in the wake of television and the internet.  Experimental form has also been documentary’s ticket into the institutions and discourses of art, having been all but banished from them for several decades. I have come to understand much of Edgar’s work and his broader trajectory in this way. I don’t know if he sees it similarly.

For every photograph in the world, past and present, there is or was someone who could say something on its behalf. Where it was taken. What it shows. What the broader context was.

Photographs cannot do that for themselves, as they are so easily cut off, so easily orphaned from those who might be able to supply the missing information.  What a photograph in isolation powerfully describes it equally powerfully fails to account for. This is why so much photographic culture has evolved, both in the mainstream and the margins, as image-text practices of one kind or another, and as practices of accumulation. One photograph is never enough.

I often hear photographers describe themselves as ‘visual storytellers’ (Edgar does not consider himself one). It’s an attractive label but also somewhat misleading. A still, mute photograph, extracted from the noise and continuum of life is the gift (or problem) received in exchange for letting go of the story. The photographer’s storytelling then involves the overcoming of this letting go, usually through words and sequencing, but the overcoming is never complete, and to pretend it is complete is folly.

The authority suggested by an image is only ever dependent. William Henry Fox Talbot, in 1844, described photography as “mute testimony”, offering “evidence of a novel kind”, adding that “what the judge and jury might say to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculation of those who possess legal acumen.” He knew there and then, right at the beginnings of photography, that matter would never resolve. For Talbot, the novelty of photography was its existential relation to what was before the camera, or at least to the light bouncing off it, passing through the lens and registering on a light sensitive surface. This is what came to be called photography’s indexical character, which involves not just a causal relation between referent and image, but a mechanised, automated relation that is substantially beyond intention or will. No painter would bother to put all that detail there unless they were aiming for photorealism. And no words could very well describe it.  The photograph will register more detail, more information than anyone could have wanted, and this excess will somehow underscore its reality effect. But a reality effect isn’t reality. It’s an effect and it needs support if it is going to be anything other than a seductive enigma. Here is the artist and writer Victor Burgin:

[n]ews reports that refer to images of a massacre but with the caution that the veracity of the images ‘cannot yet be confirmed’. This has become a familiar refrain throughout the reporting of the recent and ongoing conflicts in the Arab world. The image is never enough, at some point someone has to step forward and say: ‘I was there, I saw this’ – and then even this statement has to be interrogated and either substantiated or denied by others […]  The most epistemologically profound register of the indexical is discursive and affective, the optical is quite literally superficial.[ii]

Indeed. It is not as if journalism, or reportage, or documentary, or realism began with photography. There was writing, there was drawing, and there was the eye-witness account. It could well turn out that photography’s special claim in this arena was a distraction, rooted in its labour-saving mode of description.

But we are still left with the rend, the inevitable tear between the image and what it can be made to mean, between the visual and its textual supplement, or saviour.  Edgar and I continue to talk about this as we look across the growing sequence on the floor. How is the meaning of an image modified and enriched by its placement next to another, or even under another? What is the difference between a glance between images across a page spread, and turning the page to pass over one image for the next? What writing would help? What writing would hinder?  Can a photograph, so clearly out of its originating context find a meaningful place in a new one?

In the end the artist can only do so much with their material. They make the work but not the meaning, which is the privilege and the obligation of the viewer/reader. The musician John Cage once called it ‘response-ability’. The ability to respond, but also the responsibility to respond. Any meaningful practice asks us to consider what is being described, how it is being described and to recognise the parameters. If the realist project is an experimental one, it is going to require experimental audiences.

[i] Bertolt Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism’ (1936), in Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs, Aesthetic and Politics, New Left Books, London, 1977.

[ii] Victor Burgin, ‘Other Criteria’, Frieze magazine, April 2013.