Martine Stig — Noir

“‘Noir’ throws me toward a gap. The gap between photographs. Each spread of Martine Stig’s book is arranged in a 2 x 2 grid divided by clear white lines. A grid has one to four images of hard-lit Amsterdam city scenes. A viewer turns a page and sees —as distinctly as a picture—the blank spots. The connections between images, normally not visible to a viewer, are visualised here as white blocks. The spaces between grow into the spaces around. What are these ruptures in the photo sequence? Do they divide photographs or bring them together? Do they exist simply to be jumped over, or are they entities on their own? What, then, is the mechanism that allows us to bridge the gaps between images?”
— Daria Tuminas, excerpt of ‘Eye + Water =’, a text written alongside the publication ‘Noir’.