In a two-part interview, we talk to Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins about his latest photo book- Anton’s Hand is Made of Guilt. No Muscle or Bone. He has a Gung-ho Finger and a Grief-Stricken Thumb (2025) released under Moth House.
Shortlisted for this year’s Prix Du Livre, Rencontres D’Arles and the PhotoEspaña Photobook of the Year Award, it’s a photo-book 6 years in the making.
On the surface this is a “research based” project. It details the actual events surrounding the disappearance and death of photojournalist (and friend of Edgar) Anton Hammerl (1969-2011) during the 2011 Libyan war.
But on a deeper level this is a cathartic project as Edgar seeks to come to terms with his own grief and loss.
In seeking to come to terms with the loss of his friend in this war, the project raises an important and pivotal question-“how to tell a story when there are no witnesses”
In part 1 of the interview, we understand the project and its genesis.
Very few people can connect with the theme of war or traumatic loss unless they have been through it
THE THESIS
The title actually began with a formal challenge I set myself. I’ve always been drawn to purely typographic photobook covers (I believe none of the books I have published in the last 20 years have had images on the covers). I began to wonder if I could create a title that was also the cover—a piece of text so complete it could occupy the entire space.
But that formal exercise was obviously just the surface excuse to come up with a really resonant title. As my work has become more experimental, so has my approach to titles; they are a vital extension of the project itself.
In this case, the title is a metaphor—a quasi-synecdoche, if you will—for the profound conflict at the heart of photojournalism. The ‘Hand’ represents the photographer’s agency, but it’s one made not of flesh and bone, but of the moral and emotional weight of the work: ‘Guilt.’
This hand is torn between two opposing forces. The ‘Gung-ho Finger’ is the relentless, mechanical impulse that depresses the shutter and seeks out the image, often regardless of the human context. It’s the drive to get the shot. In contrast, the ‘Grief-stricken Thumb,’ which provides the camera with stability, is the conscience. It embodies the heavy moral burden that comes with witnessing trauma.
The title is the entire thesis of the book: the constant, agonizing tension between action and consequence, observation and complicity. Which, of course, is my biggest criticism of photojournalism.
HOW TO TELL A STORY WHEN THERE ARE NO WITNESSES
the constant, agonizing tension between action and consequence, observation and complicity.
Precisely through the impossible document. This method enables the work to function as both memorial and trace, embodying and testifying to absence, grief, and loss. It works by foregrounding photography’s own inherent limitations or looking beyond the referent, and compelling a conceptual and ontological shift, one that challenges the viewer’s expectations of certainty and closure. It, re-orients their role from passive consumer to active visual producer.
Everything in the project is structured around these ideas. The lack of stable reference points. Not being entirely sure whose depicted in the images. The interactive features that both reveal and obscure aspects of the images. Soundscapes giving us a sensorial feel of what it’s like to be on the ground, (something that photographs are unable to do). Strange images I researched and downloaded from Gaddafi loyalist and combatant darkweb forums which talk of the phenomenology of being in the thick of it and at the same time the difficulty of documenting something. And, of course, there are all the images that seek to both trace Anton’s journey but also become an embodiment of him, of his lost life.
None of the individuals in the project were chosen at random. They are all surrogates for Anton himself.
COMMISSIONS
David Campany is a friend and someone whose writing I have always admired. He is someone you don’t have to give much context to about any given work. He gets it immediately. I wanted to invite someone who could provide the work some context without breaking it down too much but at the same time connect the work to the relevant discourses around photography.
I have my own ideas about the work but didn’t want to ‘contaminate’ the project with them. I did not want this book to be overtly theorised or contextualised. I needed to invite someone who could walk that tight rope.
As to Will elf’s contribution it was a completely different approach. I wanted the texts to be open-ended but at the same time to contain key ideas that might help the reader make sense of the images, without guiding them down a specific path.
So, I gave him key ideas, words and topics around which to structure his texts. Very few people can connect with the theme of war or traumatic loss unless they have been through it. So, I asked him if he could come up with a variety of short stories that better connected with more familiar experiences of loss: like losing a child to cancer, a father to suicide. Importantly, I asked him to also integrate into the texts some of the bibliographic references that guided my own research. I don’t want to give away too much but all I will say is that each of the 7 short stories contains cryptic clues about how to read the work.
Very much in line with Perec’s own work (who incidentally is referenced in one of his stories).
HOUSE OF MIRRORS
Information and misinformation is increasingly everything. Just look at the misinformation ecosystem we live in. My work does not make this its central theme, but it’s there in all the Gaddafi loyalists or combatant private forum screenshots. As to the wars with Russia and Ukraine and the war in Israel, … don’t get me started… They will only lead to further radicalisation. And I don’t just mean between the warring parties. You can see it everywhere. It’s frustrating what has happened in Ukraine and Gaza… it’s difficult to sit by while so many innocent people are dying. It makes everything seem redundant.