See You Soon

I’ve often described myself as an introvert. Getting lost in my own mind is often a source of comfort and a place to recharge. In some sense, it feels like I’m also doing that creatively with my practice right now - I’m introverting, looking within. Reassembling my thoughts, and feelings, and how I express them through photography. I don't know how or what my practice will look like at the end of the Master in Photography at ECAL, but I’m excited to see where this experience will lead.

Here are some excerpts of the works I’ve also started to make and explore during my first semester on the Master in Photography at ECAL;

I Hope This Finds You Well…” (Moving Image, 2025)

I Hope This Finds You Well unfolds within the banal sterility of an unknown corporate setting, where the human body is both exalted and discarded. Drawing on Marx’s view of the body as an appendage to the machinery of capitalism - valued only for its capacity to produce, then discarded when it falters. The piece interrogates the dissonance of a system that demands health and productivity while depleting the very bodies it exploits.

Through slow motion and fluid camera movements, the film lingers on the character’s body, capturing its strained precision, its fragile poise. The choreography becomes a vocabulary of exhaustion, each movement a negotiation with the system’s unrelenting demands. The soundscape hums with the rhythm of rupture and fatigue, amplifying the disorientation.

At its core, the project questions what remains of the human body when AI, capitalism’s new appendage, supplants it. It is a study of obsolescence - of what happens when the system’s hunger for efficiency consumes the worker entirely. So if labor’s worth is measured solely by productivity, what is left when the body breaks? What futures await when the machine no longer needs us?

“I Can’t Bear for You to See Me Cry” (WIP, 2025)

I Can’t Bear for You to See Me Cry is a reflection on the gradual erosion of sight and the subtle betrayals it brings. It begins almost imperceptibly - a face you thought you recognized, a doorway missed by an inch, a step that doesn’t exist where you thought it would be. These small disruptions gather weight, folding the world inward in quiet, insidious gestures. Shadows creep, spaces widen, and what was once familiar becomes unsteady, shifting beyond reach.

This is not simply a story of loss but of adaptation. As sight recedes, other senses press forward: the texture of wood meeting your palm, the cool kiss of air on your neck, the quiet shift of a room’s atmosphere. What was overlooked becomes vivid; what was certain dissolves into the ephemeral. This absence is redefined - not emptiness, but presence reshaped, traced through texture, sound, and memory.

The project dwells in the tension between longing and acceptance, clarity and abstraction. It asks how we hold onto a world that shifts beyond our grasp, and how, in unraveling, we might reconfigure ourselves. Even in the dark, there is a rhythm to the unseen - a quiet, persistent reminder that presence endures, even as the light fades.

Thomas Martin was part of Face-to-Face: Arles Edition 2024.

Check out his Artist Feature Somewhere Less Than Heaven.