Punctured Photographs by Yael Martínez Illuminate the Daily Ruptures of Systemic Violence

The Mexican state of Guerrero lies on the southern Pacific coast and is home to the popular tourist destination of Acapulco. It’s also one of the nation’s most violent areas due to drug trafficking and cartel presence, and is one of six states that account for nearly half of the country’s total homicides.

For artist and photographer Yael Martínez, the reality of organized crime became more pronounced when, in 2013, three of his family members disappeared. He began to speak with others in his community who had experienced similar traumas and to connect threads across the borders of Mexico to Honduras, Brazil, and the United States.

small holes pierce a dark photo of a close up shot of a child — “Itzel at home,” Guerrero, Mexico

Luciérnagas, which translates to fireflies, comes from Martínez’s meditation on this extreme brutality that “infiltrates daily life and transforms the spirit of a place,” a statement says. Now published in a volume by This Book Is True, the poetic series punctures dark, nighttime photographs with minuscule holes. When backlit, the images bear a dazzling constellation of light that distorts the images in which violence isn’t depicted but rather felt.

In one work, for example, a man holding a firework stands in a poppy field, a perforated cloud of smoke enveloping his figure. He’s performing an annual ritual on the sacred hill of La Garza, and the setting exemplifies a poignant contradiction between ancestral cultures and a crop that has been subsumed by capitalism and is essential to cartel power. A statement elaborates:

We don’t see death in Luciérnaga, but its omnipresence is felt throughout, lingering in the shadows of each photograph. Each image painfully underwritten by the result of a calculated violence that visited unseen and undetected, leaving behind the immense void of a vanished loved one. And yet there is always a sense of hope that informs the making of this work.

Luciérnagas is available from This Book Is True. Find more from Martínez on Instagram.