Enrique Martínez between Memory, Matter, and Artificial Intelligence

The Image That Refuses to Remain an Image: Enrique Martínez between Memory, Matter, and Artificial Intelligence

Cyanotype occupies a well-established place in the history of photography. John Herschel introduced the process in 1842 as part of his experiments with iron-based photographic methods, and its distinctive blue became one of its defining characteristics.¹ Its history, however, does not determine how the process must function today. Cyanotype can be approached as a historical photographic method, yet it can also serve as a contemporary artistic language. The work of Argentine artist Enrique Martínez is particularly revealing in this regard. Rather than reconstructing an earlier form of photographic practice, the artist uses cyanotype to explore memory, place, materiality, chance and, more recently, the relationship between artificially generated images and physical photographic objects.²

Enrique Martínez encountered cyanotype in 2015 while looking for an inexpensive way to make photographic prints. What began as a practical solution soon opened possibilities that he had not found in digital photography. He became interested in the traces produced by sensitising paper, by brushwork and by the physical behaviour of the process itself. What might appear as an imperfection in conventional photography can become part of the image in his practice. He describes this attitude as elogio al error, or “praise of error”. The phrase refers not simply to accepting accidental flaws, but to treating the visible consequences of the process as meaningful elements of the work.² The image is therefore inseparable from the conditions in which it is made. Paper, fabric and stone do not function as neutral supports. Their individual characteristics affect the way the image develops, while the choice of material is tied to the conceptual aims of a particular project. Enrique Martínez is explicit on this point: experimentation has value only when the material decision contributes something to what the work is attempting to express.²

Such an approach connects with broader discussions of photographic materiality. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart have argued that photographs should be understood simultaneously as images and objects, with their physical properties shaping the ways in which they circulate and acquire meaning.³ Geoffrey Batchen likewise challenges the idea that photography can be reduced to representation or understood only as an abstract medium. Photographs are material and cultural things, and their meanings are often inseparable from their physical existence.⁴ Enrique Martínez turns this theoretical proposition into a working method.

The River as Part of the Image

This becomes particularly clear in Río. The project grew out of a flood experienced near the artist's home, close to the river running through Villa María. The event became a difficult personal memory, and returning to the river through photography was also a way of reconsidering that experience. Enrique Martínez subsequently decided to use water from the same river in the making of the photographs. The cyanotypes were immersed in the river, allowing its water to leave physical marks on the works, echoing the traces that the flood had left in the artist's surroundings.²

The river is therefore more than the subject of the photographs. In conventional photographic representation, a place leaves a trace through light. Here, the represented place also acts upon the photographic object after exposure. The work records the river visually, while the river itself participates in shaping the physical surface of the print. That distinction changes the status of the photograph. Once the surface preserves evidence of its encounter with the environment, the print can no longer be understood solely as visual information. Its material form becomes part of the experience it conveys. Enrique Martínez's Río belongs to a broader field of contemporary photographic practice in which materiality is central to meaning rather than secondary to representation.³

Chance enters the process at precisely this point. Time, water and chemical variables cannot be controlled completely, and Enrique Martínez accepts that lack of control as part of the work. In wet cyanotype, unpredictability is not simply a technical inconvenience. It becomes one of the conditions through which the image is made. The artist even extends this idea to authorship, arguing that what he cannot control also belongs to the artistic process, the work and its authorship.²
This does not mean surrendering the process to chance. The artist continues to determine the material, sensitisation, exposure and working conditions. His role lies partly in establishing those conditions and then allowing the behaviour of the materials to influence the result. That relationship has changed with experience. After around ten years of working with cyanotype, Enrique Martínez has learned to systematise parts of the process and to control a greater number of variables, yet individual works remain different from one another. Technical knowledge has given him greater precision without removing uncertainty from the process.²

Such a position reflects the breadth of contemporary cyanotype practice documented by Christina Z. Anderson. Historical printing methods can now be found alongside experimental, abstract and conceptual approaches, with artists working on a wide range of supports and modifying established procedures.⁵ The continued relevance of cyanotype therefore does not depend on preserving it in a historically unchanged form. Its material characteristics can become useful precisely because they enable forms of image-making that would be difficult to achieve through more standardised processes.

The encounter between cyanotype and artificial intelligence extends this line of enquiry. In 2026, Enrique Martínez presented Entre algoritmos e imposibilidades, derivas posibles at the Usina Cultural in Villa María as part of the exhibition programme of the Universidad Nacional de Villa María.⁶ The project brought together computational image generation and a photographic process whose outcome depends heavily on material conditions. One of the recent works begins with a painting made by the artist's great-great-grandfather around 1900. Enrique Martínez photographed the painting and then used artificial intelligence to imagine what the woman depicted in it might look like as a contemporary photographic subject. The resulting images were subsequently translated into wet cyanotypes.²

The significance of the work lies in the sequence of transformations. A family painting enters photography, is reinterpreted through an algorithmic system, becomes the basis for a physical negative and finally takes material form through cyanotype. Each stage alters what came before. The final work cannot therefore be understood simply as a reproduction of the original painting. It is the result of successive acts of interpretation and material transformation.

Joanna Zylinska, writing on AI-based art, argues for understanding contemporary image-making through technical arrangements in which human decisions become entangled with computational systems.⁷ Enrique Martínez introduces another layer into that relationship. The image passes through a computational system and then through a chemical and material process whose behaviour cannot be fully predicted. Human intention remains present, but it operates alongside forms of agency belonging to the algorithm and to the photographic materials. The artist also identifies a striking parallel between artificial intelligence and wet cyanotype. Neither guarantees exact repetition. An AI system may generate variations even when the same instructions are used, while wet cyanotype introduces variation through the interaction of light, water, chemistry and the sensitised surface.² The important distinction is therefore not simply between digital and analogue image-making. Both systems produce variation, but they do so through different forms of operation. Digital imagery can exist through countless versions without requiring a unique physical manifestation. Cyanotype depends on a specific material event involving light, chemistry and a physical support. Joanna Sassoon's discussion of photographic materiality in the age of digital reproduction is useful here because it draws attention to the changing relationship between images and their physical carriers.⁸ Enrique Martínez takes a digitally generated image and subjects it to a process that restores material conditions without returning the image to any earlier state. The result is another object.

For the artist, that distinction is central to the project. The photograph of the original painting, its transformation through artificial intelligence, the production of a negative and the subsequent cyanotype are separate stages, each capable of producing a distinct work.² Cyanotype is therefore not merely the final printing method applied to an AI-generated picture. The material process changes what that picture becomes.

Authorship on the Other Side of the Image

This leads directly to the question of authorship. Enrique Martínez asks who should be regarded as the author of a work whose origins lie in a painting made by his great-great-grandfather: the original painter, the photographer who recorded the painting, the artist who transformed it, the AI system that generated the new image, the person who selected and arranged the final result, or the cyanotype process itself, given the unpredictability of its material outcome.²

There is no single answer in the artist's account. What emerges instead is a form of distributed agency. Several decisions and operations contribute to the final object, and no single stage fully explains its existence. This problem can be placed within a broader discussion of the archive in contemporary art.   

Hal Foster identified an “archival impulse” in practices that retrieve materials associated with the past and reconfigure them within new artistic structures.⁹ In Enrique Martínez's work, the family painting functions in precisely this way. It is not preserved as a static record. It is brought into a new technological context in which it can generate another image and another set of questions.

The same principle operates in Río. Memory is not contained solely in the photographic representation 
of the river. It enters the work through a process in which the river itself can leave a physical trace. In both projects, the past is not merely represented; it is subjected to another encounter with the present. This is significant for the broader question of historical photographic processes. The renewed interest in cyanotype, gum bichromate and other alternative methods is often described as a revival of analogue photography. Such a description tells only part of the story. Enrique Martínez does not use cyanotype to recreate an earlier photographic culture. He uses it because its physical characteristics - the visible traces of making, the behaviour of the material and the possibility of unpredictable results - support questions that are distinctly contemporary.²

The distinction between reconstruction and contemporary use is important here. A historical process may  be employed to reproduce an earlier appearance or procedure, but it can also be treated as a medium whose properties remain available for new artistic purposes. In Enrique Martínez's practice, cyanotype belongs to the second category. Its nineteenth-century origins remain part of its history, yet they do not limit what the process can mean today. The artist explicitly describes cyanotype as capable of functioning as a contemporary artistic language.²

Contemporary practice can consequently alter colour, supports, sensitisation and processing without abandoning the historical identity of the process. Christina Z. Anderson's survey makes clear how far cyanotype has already moved beyond its original applications.⁵ For Enrique Martínez, however, technical experimentation acquires significance when it changes the relationship between image and material object. Photography in this practice therefore has no single stable form. It can begin as a photographic record, become a digitally generated image, serve as the basis for a negative and finally emerge as a unique physical object. Each stage introduces different possibilities and constraints.

This also makes it difficult to identify a precise point at which the photograph becomes an object.  When asked about that threshold, Enrique Martínez describes a sequence of experiments and decisions concerning sensitisation, exposure time, liquids, materials and surfaces rather than a single decisive moment.² The object develops gradually , through the interaction of intention and material process.

Seen from this perspective, the artist's practice investigates what happens when an image moves through different forms of memory, technology and matter. Earlier layers are not simply erased. The family painting remains the source of the AI-generated image; the digital image becomes the basis for the cyanotype; water leaves evidence of the place represented in Río. Each stage remains perceptible within the next, although transformed. The final cyanotype is consequently more than a photographic representation. Its photographic character includes the history of its own making - the decisions, transformations and material events through which it came into existence. Enrique Martínez's practice also complicates the idea that historical photographic processes survive because of nostalgia. Cyanotype can function as an active contemporary tool precisely because its material behaviour differs from that of a purely digital image. It provides a way of thinking about memory and place, while also opening questions about authorship, technological mediation and the status of the photographic object. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of these works is the transformation they undergo. A photograph does not have to stop at the moment of exposure, nor does a digitally generated image have to remain digital. It can be re-entered into a material process in which chemistry, light, water and time contribute to the final result.

What emerges from Enrique Martínez's practice is therefore not the disappearance of photography, but its expansion into a field where image, process and object can no longer be treated as entirely separate. A historical photographic process becomes a way of examining the contemporary image, including its materiality, its transformations and the increasingly complex question of who - or what - participates in making it.

Notes

1. Mike Ware, “Herschel’s Cyanotype: Invention or Discovery?”, History of Photography, vol. 22, no. 4, 1998, pp. 371-379, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1998.10443901.

2. Enrique Martínez, responses to the author's questions, email correspondence, 2026. 

3. Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London-New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 1-15.

4. Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

5. Christina Z. Anderson, Cyanotype: The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice, New York: Focal Press, 2019.

6. Universidad Nacional de Villa María, “UC: Espacio de Artes Visuales con nuevas muestras”, 2026.

7. Joanna Zylinska, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams, London: Open Humanities Press, 2020.

8. Joanna Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction”, in Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London-New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 186-202.

9. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, October, no. 110, 2004, pp. 3-22, DOI: 10.1162/0162287042379847.

Bibliography

Anderson, Christina Z. Cyanotype: The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice. New York: Focal Press, 2019.

Batchen, Geoffrey. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London-New York: Routledge, 2004.

Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October, no. 110 (2004): 3-22.

Martínez, Enrique. Responses to the author's questions. Email correspondence, 2026.

Sassoon, Joanna. “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” In Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, 186-202. London-New York: Routledge, 2004.

Ware, Mike. “Herschel’s Cyanotype: Invention or Discovery?” History of Photography 22, no. 4 (1998): 371-379.

Zylinska, Joanna. AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020.