Banner: Martha Naranjo Sandoval, from Small Death (image excerpt)

MARTHA NARANJO SANDOVAL

Martha is a US, Brooklyn-based visual artist, photographer, publisher, and cataloguer from Mexico City. Her latest book Small Death collects photographs from her first decade living in New York after emigrating from Mexico City. Shaped around her original contact sheets and film reels, it comprises an artist’s book unfolding in tactile and iterative form. Sandoval’s work moves between streetscapes, nude self-portraits, compositions of found forms, and tender photographs of her family, all suffused with a sensitivity to the ways in which the artist’s surroundings, loved ones, and home continuously shape her sense of self and belonging. The artist’s husband, parents, and siblings are pictured in their homes as well as in more dislocating rural and urban landscapes between the US and Mexico, tracing a continuum between displacement and rootedness.Meanwhile close-up self-portraits, interspersed throughout, act as registers of the determined introspection that anchors this powerful exploration of the image sequence and book form as means of physical and sensual expression.

Small Death was a finalist in the prestigious 2025 Paris Photo – Aperture Photobook Awards (First Photobook).

Martha holds a degree in Film from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography and Bard College. She is the founder and director of the editorial project Matarile Ediciones, which publishes work by artists who are immigrants or part of a recent diaspora. She’ll be bringing some of this work to the Photobook/NZ bookfair.

Martha will be giving the keynote lecture at Photobook/NZ as well as holding a Critical Practice Review session where you can get one-on-one feedback about your project.