WANDA MARTIN

PERSONAL PROJECTS

SONGS OF INNOCENCE

AND EXPERIENCE

Self-portrait/collage project on post-modern love.

CONCEPT

I always had an obsession with romantic beauty and a tendency to romanticize my relationships.

Romantic love is predicated on the notion of failure because it’s the clashing of expectations and reality and this clashing of the notion of ideal love and pure reality becomes a postmodern "authentic tragedy”. I’ve been obsessed with paintings and novels of unfulfilled love stories, like Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Pushkin’s Onegin, Millais’s Ophelia, or Waterhouse’s Lady Shallott – and I often positioned myself into the same “role” in my own personal life. I began to romanticize the heartaches throughout the years which created a pattern.

This project became an art therapy and a way of self-reflection.

NIGHTS OUT

“father and daughter photographers chronicle nightlife and youth culture 40 years apart”


CONCEPT

“Photographers Wanda Martin and her father Gábor Martin may have spent their twenties 1,000 miles and more than four decades apart – Gábor behind the Iron Curtain in 70s socialist Hungary and Wanda in today’s London – but their joint series on nightlife and youth culture demonstrates that the desire to party is both timeless and universal.” The technique (shot on 35mm black and white negative), the fashions, the hair styles are very similar, apart from some hidden details such as smartphones, laptops or Lenin’s portrait hanging behind the DJ, sometime you can hardly tell the pictures apart, which one was taken in the 70s Hungary , which one was taken in 2010s London. “The drive of the youth has been always the same: forgetting about reality – work, everyday struggles – for some stolen hours and just having fun, dancing, drinking and falling in love, regardless any political regime.” (i-D)

LOVERS

CONCEPT

"Wanda Martin is photographing couples of all genders and sexualities in their closest and most intimate quarters: bed.

“My aim was to explore the nature of sexual fluidity and

show the similarity between heterosexual and homosexual relationships,” says Martin. “I try to celebrate love par excellence and show that love and sexuality don’t depend on sex or gender, only on the person. I’m shooting couples in their own rooms, in their private environment.” (Dazed)