Sarah Edmands Martin

DESIGNER

Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

Designer, artist, and scholar working at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. 


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Recent News

UIC School of Design guest juror
m(other)ing exhibition open
forthcoming talk at Cornell





SARAHEDMANDS
SARAHEDMANDSMARTIN
SARAHEDMANDS


Photography

Digital photography, film photography2017–present
A small selection of photographic work that explores magic, whimsy, and the blur of the otherworldly.








Concept


This photographic practice is both a methodological ladder and a poetic invocation to view photography not merely as a document, but as a threshold. The photograph becomes most alive precisely in that liminal space Roland Barthes identifies: the wound, the punctum, where sensation precedes sense. To observe is not to catalog, but to hover, between knowing and not-knowing, between the real and the spectral. Observation, in this sense, is an enchantment: a slow conjuring of a world both familiar and impossibly distant.

To photograph is to teach others to see. This drift is a willingness to let an image unfold its strangeness over time. While philosophers like Barthes give us the framework, it is the blur, the shimmer, the inexplicable detail caught in soft focus or shadow that invite us to dwell in the uncanny. The act of looking becomes a form of devotion, of suspension. A photograph, properly observed, asks us not only to see and to think, but to dream.


digital photography
film photography



Visit my instagram @sarahedmands for more photography.








“Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a signle agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this [...] that this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.”

Maggie Nelson Bluets 
ISBN 9781933517407, pg. 2–3
Learn more about Maggie Nelson and her writing here.













“As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for 'sentimental' reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.”


Roland Barthes Camera Lucida (1981) 
ISBN 9780374521349: pg. 21 
Read more of Barthes’ writing here.