Martín Sabyno
Ours is a time of spectacular violence. Each day, we are called to witness atrocities on our newsfeeds, bloodshed livestreamed to our phones. Yet the greatest threats we face remain unseen and under-reported, expanding across space and time while eluding our perception. These invisible harms are a source of intrigue and torment for reclusive photographer Martín Sabyno, who joins me for his second-ever interview—and the first since laying his longstanding mononym, Lengua, to rest. We continue a conversation that began two summers ago when we met in Berlin’s most infamous garten, at that odd Sunday hour when the sins of night are exposed by harsh daylight.
Since then, I have observed many of the defining artists of our generation through Sabyno’s rose-tainted lens, including our own Ali Cherri and Christelle Oyiri. Whether exhibited on fashion billboards or the pinstriped walls of his Paris flat-cum-gallery, his portraits carry the same disquieting anxiety, almost as though they aren’t meant to be seen. In his search for the invisible, Sabyno is an obsessive student of structural violences: colonial, nuclear, epidemic. But finding no answer in the landscape, he considers that this crisis might be buried within us instead. With microplastics in our blood and radioactive dust in our lungs, are we ourselves sites of catastrophe? Collapsing the binaries between inside and out, between intimacy and universality, Sabyno is the portraitist of a generation on fire, illuminating the violence within us so that we may become human again.
– Russell Reed for Geographer, 19 August 2026
Where did you grow up? Describe the view from your window.
I was born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife but grew up in Maspalomas, Gran Canaria. The view from my teenage bedroom comes in three layers: the ocean, the dunes, and buildings made of concrete.
What did your childhood there sound like?
Laughter, the ocean, foreign gibberish, foreign murmur, foreign babble, airy gasps, stones fizzing, birds complaining, weather swirling, people arguing, cameras clicking.
You mention all these cameras. What do they capture?
Before they were known as the Canaries, they were known as the Fortunate Islands. The islands host a remarkable amount of microclimates, which have made them a major tourist site for decades. Each of the eight islands has an emblematic site to visit, and therefore an emblematic photo to take. The dunes on Gran Canaria, El Teide in Tenerife. There's a big problem with the tourist board these days; people keep taking the volcanic rocks as mementos, trespassing protected areas, and dirtying the Atlantic, and it's causing an ecological crisis.
Tourists see it as paradise, but our identities are being fractured by the foreign gaze. Brazil gets around 6.6 million tourists per year while Tenerife gets 7.2 million, despite being 0.2 percent its size. People travel from afar to take the same shots of these striking landscapes, but they never show the people within them. I guess paradise is empty. The friction caused by this unregulated tourism causes collapse—both cultural and ecological—and unfortunately we tend to hold a never-ending resentment towards the outside world based on this exploitation. Sustainable tourism is possible and can have a positive impact, but without regulation it can be catastrophic.
What do your images of home show that foreigners miss?
I never really photograph there, maybe because I feel subconsciously that Canarias has been so widely immortalized that the thought of exercising my own attempts exhausts me. I want to keep it protected in my memory.
Does the culture of the Canaries persist even under these conditions?
This makes me think of the guachinches, which are informal restaurants built around the island in the ’60s for families to sell their surplus food to visitors. My dad actually makes a list of the best ones each year. Most people who visit the islands never see them, but they represent a kind of hospitality that can be sustainable: a welcome offering to visitors who see the islands not just for their landscapes, but for their unique cultures too.
This horizon of ours can’t be renounced. We draw closer to our own mysticism as the grip gets tighter, we contemplate this thing-ness of ours and protect it more than anything. It is an attempt to preserve some semblance of a future for our people. It’s important to deal with the foreigner’s fervor, and their disjunctive connection is important too. This project of reckoning and preservation reveals our own irreducible capacity to survive.
When did you last visit your hometown? What has changed?
Ever since I left, I’ve returned home for Christmas every year. Starting the new year swimming is my ritual. It’s my own personal recurring quest to unlock new places there that might inspire homesickness over time. This year, I noticed the highways collapse with cars much more frequently. I noticed that my friends and family are gaining a lot more focus on what's happening, especially when it comes to the housing crisis. I noticed that the conversations are getting a lot more serious.
Has a nonhuman being ever shaped you?
The calima is the first thing that comes to mind. Calima is haze, dust, and sand from the Sahara that travels across the Atlantic Ocean to our islands. Different studies have found that it carries radioactive isotopes dating back to the 1960s, when France ran a series of nuclear tests in Algeria. Apparently it’s nontoxic now, but it makes me think about how the political configuration of the Canary Islands resembles, at times, that of an obsolete landfill. Our government actively contributes to our own disintegration: the lack of control, management, and infrastructures on residual waters being poured into the ocean contaminates our beaches and our communities. Silent, insidious poison. The question of whom the archipelago truly exists for is rendered in exploitation. The system’s pendulum is vicious—we will only outlive this crisis with new practices in relation to the foreign.
My photographs are not from the Canaries—they’re from London, Paris, Berlin. But the calima represents a sort of nuclear anxiety that is invisible but omnipresent, something that can be seen in the lives and on the very faces of my generation. This effort has taken many shapes over the years, but in essence it is an attempt to make visible the abstract notion of living life as everything falls apart.
Most photographers interested in capturing catastrophe look to the landscape, but you primarily capture your close friends. If there is radioactive dust in our lungs, however, maybe we are sites of catastrophe ourselves. Do you consider your photographs portraits?
I consider myself a portraitist in the sense that I only really yearn to photograph ideas, new ways of going about things and new ways of perceiving. I sort of employ my friends as actors for this practice. I strive to get somewhere I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise in this way, both literally and metaphorically. But I also think a lot about the responsibility I have on how the person in front of me might be remembered; especially if it’s an assignment, the torment of creation increases.
Photography allows me to understand the world around me and its mechanisms through people. I have come to the conclusion that a lot of my passion has to do with pointing to the continuing deterioration of this world with what’s at my disposal, and somehow telling a story of the times and those who shape it. Most of the photography I obsess over is bound to the most primitive notion of representation in whatever shape or form.
This recalls Robert Nixon’s “slow violence,” naming the cumulative harms that occur invisibly across time and space without drawing spectacle. How do you photograph these invisible forces?
How do you photograph dust? I have tried following a subject through a landscape. I’ve thought of activating color, the way fire is depicted through a yellow taint. But it all seems too predictable. I don’t think I’ve figured it out yet, so I don’t know how to answer the question.
Slow violence is challenging not only because it fails to attract political attention; it also hinders grief. Have you ever felt grief for something that wasn’t alive?
I feel grief for the future we must carve together.
When we went to Climax Books last time you were in London, you picked up Zdenek Felix’s Cindy Sherman monograph. Sherman used her own body as a vessel for collective dread, dissolving her individual identity in the process. Do your subjects carry that same universality?
All of us do, that’s what we share. I love what Cindy does so much. That book really exemplifies perfectly what I try to get at. Boundaries of representation to the outmost, weirdly cosmic. It assumes political form, and her teachings assign a new role to image-making at large.
Does that theory of universality hold even for your better-known friends? I’m wondering if Arca or Petra Collins can hold universality the way your other friends can.
It does for me, which is really all I care about. The reading of a photograph is enclosed in the individualism of the eye of the beholder, as perception is placed on the level of one’s experiences. Images are mirrors, indebted to their consumers.
In this way, your practice seems to align less with Sherman than with Nan Goldin. Her depictions of the AIDS crisis were ultimately just photographs of her own friends, in all their texture and nuance. It was their preserved individuality that communicated the devastation of the crisis—real, common faces marching unjustly toward death.
Nan’s work is, at times, the basis of my thinking. This trace of her influence can be found—at least a little bit—in anyone who decides to pick up a camera and lovingly portray the world as it is. The fact that I’ve chosen this path might have something to do with coming across her work at 12 years old, as well as that of Alvin Baltrop and David Wojnarowicz. Without indulging in romanticism, their sense of possibility is embedded in what they do or what they did, in a world so broken. They are testaments to our endurance.
Despite over a decade of Tumblr infamy, you still hardly post yourself online. In a self-portrait without showing your face, how would you represent yourself?
A picture of my neck.
Are we living in dystopia or rupture?
I will borrow from Samuel R. Delany here: “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction.”
Every time I see you, we end up talking about Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. What draws you to his work?
His determination in revealing the secrecy that lies in power.
What does the politics of death tell us about life itself?
I wish I could make any sense of it.
What do you want to happen to your body after you die?
If I have a healthy body, I want to donate whatever organs I’m able to so other people can live on.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Russell Reed is an American writer based in London. The founder of Geographer, his writing can be found in Atmos, Document Journal, Guernica, and elsewhere.