Diminishing Present-Edgar Martins
“The imagery of 'The Diminishing Present' is less a set of pictures than a series of moments in which spaces, mechanisms, signs, objects and events in the instrumentalist, modified landscape of the contemporary order have become independent of causation or function. It resembles a set of location shots for unmade films from lost scenarios. It constitutes a landscape without human figures, seen as though composed in the eye of the security camera - a seeing without a subject - of a landscape already arranged for surveillance. It evokes the coda completing Antonioni's L'Eclisse, with its new residential zones filled by autonomous machines and alien structures, or Doug Aitken's post-human video landscapes. But it is something more. This landscape is actual, familiar, always there, and yet imaginary, unseen. It is the other place, which is always this place, in these things; it is there when our backs are turned, while we sleep, or as we drive past in the unconsciousness of speed, in the half-life of routine - it is the landscape that survives our absence.”

(Osborne, Peter D., 'The Accidental theorist', in The Diminishing Present, The Moth House 2005)

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Edgar Martins is Portuguese by birth, he grew up in Macau, China, where he published his first novel entitled 'Mäe, deixa-me fazer o pino'. In 1996 he moved to the UK, where he later completed an MA in Photography and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. He has exhibited extensively throughout Asia and Europe and has received numerous awards for his photographic and literary work. His first book, 'Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies' was awarded the Thames & Hudson and RCA Society Book Art Prize. A selection of images from this work were also awarded The Jerwood Photography Prize in 2003. Martins has been considered by UK art critics as 'one of the most influential young artists working within the medium of photography' (defocused.net 2005).