Edgar Martins: This is not a house

The subprime mortgage crisis, which has its roots in the closing years of the twentieth century, became apparent in 2007 and has exposed pervasive weaknesses in the regulation of the financial industry and the global financial system.
This work was shot in the USA, between November and December 2008, in the context of a commission by  The New York Times Magazine. Produced in eight separate states across sixteen different locations, these carefully researched sites expose the full extent, latitude and impact of this crisis.
The project sought to catalyse and reunite fresh experiences of a new form of American architecture by summoning a disquieting conjunction of realism and fiction. Employing both analogue and digital devices enabled me to enhance the paradoxical possibilities of the photographic image and to bring together irresolvable contradictions.
The houses depicted in this series do not refer just to the particular. They are images of spatial assemblages, of kinds of stages on which a number of quite different (and perhaps incompatible) narratives might be enacted.
This Is not a House emerges precisely at that juncture where clear words falter, where language is disturbed. It hurls us into the antinomies of perception and existence, the exploration of limits and unstable boundaries.