When Light Casts No Shadow

Edgar Martins was granted special airside access to some of the most interesting airports in Europe. The airports he chose have had a key role in history or the history of aviation. Almost all his images were produced at night, using the aprons’ floodlights, moonlight or long exposures of between ten minutes to two hours.

Some images are incredibly abstract, with a very long depth of field and often with the use of minimal lighting. In others, sky and ground merge in darkness with only the lights and airport hieroglyphics to orient us. Yet even these are hard to decode, for whilst this is a landscape of signs that can be read by the knowledgeable – pilots and air traffic controllers, for instance – it remains perplexing to the uninitiated. This juxtaposition of sign and shape is at the heart of these remarkable images.