VIVAT, MARTIN!

"Vivat, Martin!" is my quiet cry into the void left by the news of his passing. He was the one who gave me permission—bold, heretical permission—to use a flash. In a world dominated by the cult of "natural" light, where a harsh flash is considered a vulgar crutch for a bad photographer, his example was an act of liberation.

My collages are an attempt to pay tribute. In the series of handmade collages, the black sheet is the foundation, simultaneously a sign of mourning and the cosmic emptiness into which he has departed. Onto this blackness, I glue scraps of his—now our shared—world. But I don't take his works directly. First, I re-photograph them with my own camera: this is a gesture not of copying, but of touching, a tactile dialogue through the lens. Then I filter these images through myself, literally—through AI tools that become an extension of my perception, a scalpel for deconstruction. I cut out fragments, sort them by the themes of his obsession: food, trash, the beach, close-ups, ice cream. This is the lexicon with which he spoke.

And then I combine these cut-out symbols with my own photographs—the very ones taken with a flash. I create a hybrid space where his legacy meets my practice, his irony meets my longing for him. This physical collage, this manual work with scissors and glue on a black background, is an attempt to make memory tangible, material. "Vivat, Martin!" is not about death. It's about life. About the fact that a master departs but leaves a tool in the hands of those willing to use it.