Edgar Martins is a Portuguese photographer.  The photograph below comes from a series of work he produced that was inspired by the writing and the sending of letters and the power and intimacy of letters.  For this mini series he photographed paper,  carefully lit and isolated from anything else.  There is a stillness to them that belies the fact they may have been written as suicide notes, contact between prison inmates and loved ones and more. Martins spent time working with court, prison and parole officials and indeed, prisoners in Portugal exploring this theme, that often ended in death for many of his subjects.

Above is one of my own photographs from a paper shoot beside one of Edgar Martins work.  They are both very different takes on photographing paper.  Edgar Martins photograph and way of working is a lot darker the photograph is very dim compared to my way of photographing paper which uses very harsh artificial light on the paper,  this may be due to the context that Martins work with, when he photographs the paper he is looking at the power of paper in some very dark areas such as suicide notes and prison letters, the photograph portrays this in a visual manner of the black dark space with the very slim paper which itself is dimly lit,  this would be done on purpose by Martins maybe for effect of portraying the subjects he is looking into in his own visual manner.  Both takes on the paper are focusing on isolating the paper so it’s on its’ own, Martins does this with the dark space and the thin isolated paper, the paper in my photograph is isolated on the white background and left to itself on the white blank paper which is a different take on the ideas of isolating the paper.