©Yael Martínez, Mexico.Guerrero.Cochoapa El Grande.December 31 2020.Abuelo-Estrella. An elder in the Garza hill.For the Na savi people, elders are respected since they contain wisdom and connection with our mother earth. Every December 31, the Na Savi indigenous communities climb the Cerro de la Garza to perform rituals that commemorate the end and beginning of a cycle.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is pleased to announce Yael Martínez as the first winner of the newly established Edelman Impact Award in Photography. Martínez will receive a cash prize of $50,000 in recognition of his achievements in photography. Established by Cathy Edelman, the Edelman Impact Award in Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will annually recognize an outstanding emerging or mid-career photographer with a demonstrated commitment to social issues and exceptional visual storytelling. Selected by a panel of jurors with expertise in the field of photography, each year’s winner will receive an unrestricted gift of $50,000 to support their work. The award recipient and MFAH curatorial team will collaborate to make a selection of the recipient’s work to enter the museum’s collection. “After 35 years of working with mid-career and emerging photographers, I’m thrilled to support them in a new way,” commented Cathy Edelman, benefactor of the award. Following the closure of Catherine Edelman Gallery, which first opened its doors in Chicago in 1987, Edelman aimed to continue her investment in emerging artists, reaching out to Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as a partner. “The Edelman Impact Award recognizes a photographer whose work doesn’t shy away from political or social issues. I’m proud to present the first award to Mexican photographer Yael Martínez, whose work addresses the violence of organized crime in his country. Presenting this in conjunction with the MFAH makes it especially meaningful.

Yael Martínez, photo by Jalil Olmedo

“Longtime MFAH photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker took me under her wing early on, and decades later I have the joy of working with MFAH Curator Lisa Volpe, who continues that extraordinary legacy.”

Award winner Yael Martínez is based in Guerrero, Mexico. His work illustrates the resilience of Mexican communities, through a blend of documentary and conceptual photography. Often sketching on, poking through, or scratching his photographic prints, Martínez aims to craft narratives of change rather than depict a singular moment. For the artist, these interventions marring the photographic surface not only symbolize the struggles of his subjects, but also represent their resistance and communal hope. The panel of jurors for the inaugural Edelman Impact Award was comprised of Deborah Willis (Professor of Photography and Imaging New York University, Tisch School of the Arts), Susan Meiselas (Photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation), Corey Keller (Independent Photography Curator), and Lisa Volpe (Curator, Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).

Gary Tinterow, Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, noted, “Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the photography collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has embraced both emerging photographers and art that seeks to improve society by revealing injustice. The establishment of the Edelman Impact Award celebrates this history and supports artists who have dedicated their art to social issues.”

©Yael Martinez, The river of memory and my daugthes. Intervened photography. Guerrero Mexico 2022..

Luciérnaga is in many ways a ritual. An attempt to exorcise the unresolved traumas in the spectral landscape of Magnum Photographer Yael Martinez’s homeland in Guerrero, México.

The work began in 2013 after three members of the artist’s family disappeared. This tragedy began an investigation into the pervasive violence of organised crime in the region, how it infiltrates daily life and transforms the spirit of a place. He later spent time alongside other families with missing loved ones. Through these encounters, dots were connected beyond the artist’s immediate family and across borders into Honduras, Brazil, and the US, forming a constellation imbued with the shared experience of endemic violence.

Throughout the work, images are threaded together by diaristic notes from the field. They were written by Martinez as he grappled with the range of emotions presented in the aftermath of loss and the process of navigating bereavement with families who were never given a chance to mourn. 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.

Between 2019 to 2023, Martinez began a series of interventions into his photographs, piercing holes through the prints and then backlighting them. Bright rays emanate through the pictures in free flowing shapes, throwing light against a dark backdrop. In this process the light metamorphosizes with the scenes depicted and conjures an alchemy where something restorative, tentatively optimistic and resilient occurs.

It is in Luciérnaga’s blend of fantasy and reality that the well-covered topics of violence in the Latin American context are re-examined. Feelings are expressed rather than evoked, and via the ordinary characters who guide us through this book, scope is given to the humanity of those enduring a difficult territory, whilst confronting the personal cost of violence. Now brought together in book form for the first time, the disappearances at the hands of organised crime and state violence are given a new representation, one where light illuminates the darkness as the firefly leads us into new possible realms.

©Yael Martinez, Mexico.Guerrero.Zitlala..A member of the Nahua community is making an offering to the cross at the Cruzco Hill in the community of Zitlala Guerrero. Intervened photography

Yael Martínez (Guerrero, Mexico, 1984) is a photographer whose work emerges from Guerrero, documenting the social fractures of Mexico and Latin America with an intimate and deeply human gaze. His work stands at the intersection of documentary and conceptual art, transforming collective trauma into poetic visual narratives that transcend the literal representation of violence.

A full member of Magnum Photos since 2024—previously nominated in 2020 and associate in 2022—Martínez has established himself as one of the most important voices in contemporary documentary photography. His work investigates communities fragmented by organized crime violence, forced disappearances, and the social impact of these phenomena, but he does so from an approach that rejects sensationalism and instead seeks to express absence, emptiness, and resilience.

About Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The photography collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is comprised of more than 38,000 works spanning the full history of the medium from its invention to the present day. Selections from the collection are always on view in the photography galleries of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. Founded as a separate curatorial department in 1976 under the stewardship of curator Anne Tucker, the MFAH photography department has a long- standing commitment to supporting the work of early and mid-career photographers.

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Spanning 14 acres in the heart of Houston’s Museum District, the main campus comprises the Audrey Jones Beck Building, the Caroline Wiess Law Building, the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. Nearby, two house museums—Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, and Rienzi—present collections of American and European decorative arts. The MFAH is also home to the Glassell School of Art, with its Core Residency Program and Junior and Studio schools; and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), a leading research institute for 20th-century Latin American and Latino art.