Subprime surreal estate

Edgar Martins has cleverly subverted our familiarity with house imagery in order to draw us in and then provide a surprise element

On the face of it, the work of the Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins, whose This Is Not A House exhibition is currently running at the Gallery of Photography in Meeting House Square, is a million miles away from the cute itsy-bitsy images we’re used to seeing on property websites. Huge, beautiful and almost unnervingly perfect, Martins’s pictures are clearly works of art in their own right.

In fact, however, Martins has cleverly subverted our familiarity with house imagery in order to draw us in and make the subject accessible. “I really want to give the viewer the sense that he or she is looking at a straight, objective photograph,” he says. “And then, slowly, you become aware that something else is going on within the images.”

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Haunted houses: An interior in Atlanta, from Edgar Martins' This Is Not A House exhibition

In 2008, Martins was commissioned by the New York Times to produce a photo-essay about the economic downturn and the catastrophe of the subprime lending crisis. He spent six weeks travelling around 16 locations spread over six states, photographing “suburban homes, apartment blocks, hotels, ski resorts, golf courses . . . you name it”.

When the piece was published, Martins quickly found himself embroiled in a crisis of his own. “It became the focus of a heated debate, due to my decision to digitally reshape a few of the images,” he says. “People started questioning everything that was in the images.”

One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is of a deserted $10-million (€7.6m) mansion in Connecticut. The viewer looks into a white room framed by a proscenium arch – it might be a theatre set – with a wooden floor leading to double doors. The heightened symmetry of the image gives it a weird beauty which is ratcheted up a notch by the presence of some very poetic leaves scattered across the hallway.

“People started asking whether the leaves were placed there on purpose,” Martins says, adding that there’s a debate to be had about the whole notion of photo-journalism and visual “truth” in the digital age, and that he’s happy to have contributed to that debate. “But, you know,” he adds, with regard to his Connecticut photograph, “the leaves were in fact there.”

As to how he got access to these extraordinary properties, he smiles. “In the case of the mansion, all I had to do was just open the door,” he says. “Nothing was locked. There were no security personnel.” What moved him most, though, was the sheer scale of the abandonment.

“I come from a place – Portuguese Macau – where there is a shortage of housing. And most of the places I’ve lived in, there has been a shortage of housing. So the excess in these places – it was just mind-boggling, really.”

The title photograph, This Is Not A House, shows a deserted street of detached houses in Atlanta, Georgia. Weeds have taken over the landscaped areas. Across the tarmac lies a bright red “Stop” sign that has fallen to the ground. On top of its red gash, a tiny street sign reads, poignantly: “Wisteria Way”.

“That was one of the places I most enjoyed photographing,” Martins says. “ It was an entire neighbourhood. There were maybe 30 or 40 houses on several roads, a cul de sac, a roundabout. It really looked otherworldly.”

As with ghost estates here in Ireland, the mute buildings speak volumes about the ruined aspirations of the people who would have moved in.

Martins also has a surreal streak; another picture shows a chair perched where no chair should ever be, on top of a door leading into an empty hallway. The overall effect is to question the stability of these shelters we take so much for granted.

Martins likes to work at night, making exposures which might last for anything up to three and a half hours. “There’s an experimental side to it that you can never fully pin down, and I really enjoy that,” he says. “At night, it’s quite difficult even to focus, let alone know how the image will come out.”

For one enormous panoramic shot – at one metre 30cm high and three metres wide, the largest frame ever to have been accommodated in the Gallery of Photography – Martins ran around the building setting off a flash gun, dressed in black so he wouldn’t show up in the final image.

What if someone, or something, does show up at the wrong moment, say 90 minutes in?

“Tough. You have to try again. And given the time-frames involved, you might have to wait until the next night. It’s the antithesis of the idea that you can go into a place, take two or three snaps in two or three minutes, and come out with a set of images that ends up defining the place.”

An image, however stunning, is not a house – let alone a home. It’s something to think about next time you’re browsing through property pictures.

This is Not A House is at the Gallery of Photography until March 17th. Admission is free, all welcome