Edgar Martins, a photographer who grew up and lived in Macau for several years, was awarded Photographer of the Year 2023 for the portfolio series “Our War,” a project that features a collection of portraits of his late photojournalist friend, Anton Hammerl.
The project that was created to honor and commemorate a friend who was killed in the 2011 Libyan Civil War has won a top award at the Sony World Photography Awards, with a portrait that also won the Portrait Category of the 2023 awards.
Frustrated by the lack of progress in the investigation to find Hammerl’s body, Martins traveled to Libya in 2022 with the help of a smuggler.
However, the deteriorating situation in the country has made his search unfeasible.
While in North Africa, Martins photographed all types of people that he met – whether they were involved in the war, ex-militia, their descendants, local residents – anyone that could be a structure of a self-portrait of Hammerl.
Speaking to the Times, the photographer said the “unexpected win” not only took him aback but was also “quite an emotional experience because I get to share my friend’s story on [the] world stage.
“For the last three to four years, this has really been just inside my mind. I’ve been working on the ground and all of that but it was very much a personal project. Now, of course, I’m sharing it with the world,” said the photographer, based in the UK.
In a statement to the World Photo Organization, Martins explained the series of shots were selected because “they resembled him, espoused similar ideas and beliefs, or reminded me of him at different stages of our friendship.”
“This project portrays a complex story, warped by absence, that talks of the difficulty of documenting, testifying, witnessing, remembering, honoring and imagining,” he said.
Although Martins has been overwhelmed with the win, he considers winning the competition as subjective amid the over 410,000 entries in the prestigious contest.
The story of his late friend, who travelled to Libya to cover the conflict between pro-regime and anti-Gaddafi forces, and then was forcefully abducted and killed by government militia, was just a jumping off point for this specific journey.
Although there had been other elements directly related to his practice as a photographer, Martins said he had always been very conscious of how photography has played in war zones and how it sometimes fails in storytelling.
Therefore, “Our War,” which is still a work-in-progress project scheduled to be launched, worldwide in 2024, is also a space to reflect on the decisive but paradoxical role that photography has played in conflict zones.
“I’ve always been somewhat critical of the way in which documentaries [or] photographs sometimes fall into [the] same old tropes,” he told the Times.
A story backed by grief and loss, the series is part of a wider, much more complex project that includes sound, installations and short films – a myriad of different types of approaches to tell the story.
“This isn’t an orthodox documentary project. It’s a project where the reality and my imagined reality of the places and circumstances [meet]. […] Conflict has always been polarized in terms of the aggressors and victims. The reality of course is always much [more] nuanced that this,” Martins added.
Last week, the World Photography Organization revealed its 10 category winners and the prestigious Photographer of the Year, honoring professional photographers who have provided a snapshot from parts of the world rarely seen.
The Photographer of the Year award had a field of 180,000 entries, and includes the prize of a lead place in the World Photography exhibition, imaging equipment and a USD40,000 cash prize.
Martins’ work triumphed in the Portraiture category of the Professional competition.
In a statement, prize chair Mike Trow described the project as a “powerful, personal set of portraits,” adding: “(Martins’) work highlights the lengths photographers will go to to tell a story and create meaning; each image giving a sense of the journey Anton took without ever being explicit about how his life ended.”
Born in Évora, Martins completed an MA in Photography and Fine Arts at the Royal College of Art. Throughout his career, he has received the Jerwood Photography Award (2003), the inaugural New York Photography Award (Fine Art category, May 2008), the BES Photo Prize (Portugal, 2009), the Sony World Photography Award (2009 and 2018), the International Photography Awards 2010 (Abstract category) and the Hangar Centre Photography Prize (2021), among others.
Between 2002 and 2022 Martins published 15 separate monographs, which were received with critical acclaim. He was selected to represent Macau (China) at the 54th Venice Biennale.
