I See A Darkness

I See A Darkness is a 4000-word paper commissioned by fine art publishers, The Moth House, as the sole English-language text included in a photographic monograph on Portuguese photographer, Edgar Martins. Edgar Martins was described by pioneering video artist Bill Viola as “the most interesting photographer working today”.

There are, effectively, two central research questions that underpin the paper: first, to what extent can creative media be coherently and credibly addressed as carriers of conceptual freight; secondly, to what extent and for what reasons has an aesthetics of ‘darkness’ been marginalised in photographic and other art practices. The paper marshals evidence and argument from a number of domains – including philosophy, Japanese aesthetics, popular astrophysics – in pursuit of these two questions.