There’s a constellation of grief glowing through Yael Martínez’s photographs—a quiet yet searing burn that feels as though it’s been branded onto the retina. His series Luciérnagas (Fireflies) doesn’t shout about death. It glows around it. It pulses where the unspeakable used to stand.

Based in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most violent regions and a terrain scarred by narco-politics, Martínez offers neither documentary proof nor forensic precision. Instead, he gives us symbolic truth, filtered through a photographic process that’s less about capturing a moment and more about transfiguring it.

In Luciérnagas, Martínez literally punctures his images. Thousands of minuscule holes pierce the surface of his prints, transforming nocturnal scenes into radiant maps of invisible pain. When backlit, the photographs shimmer like distant galaxies—fireflies in the dark—delicately resisting oblivion.

Fireflies That Refuse to Die

The origin of this work is heartbreak: in 2013, three of Martínez’s family members disappeared. The void they left—personal, psychic, societal—became a wound that demanded light. But what kind of light can you offer when the bodies never come home, when mourning is denied the finality of death?

Martínez began interviewing others with similar stories, unspooling a constellation of loss that stretches from Guerrero to Brazil to the Honduran border. The photos he made are rituals of symbolic visibility, where absence becomes a kind of presence, and silence is broken not with noise but with flickers of ghostly light.

A man launches a firework in a poppy field, and the photograph—perforated like skin—glows with smoke and ritual. The poppies are beautiful. Their opiates fund brutality. It is precisely this contradiction that Martínez refuses to resolve. He offers no clean lines. Instead: emotion, texture, ache.

The Art of the Puncture

Technically, Martínez’s method is deceptively simple. He photographs scenes at night—landscapes, portraits, rituals—and then uses a fine-point instrument to perforate the prints, dot by dot, until the paper is transformed into a kind of wounded vellum. These punctures act like tiny wounds: each one radiating.

The process is meditative, intimate, nearly obsessive. It evokes both hand embroidery and exhumation. In backlit installations, the photographs feel like x-rays of memory: veined with grief, yet pulsing with the stubborn presence of those who refuse to disappear completely.

Absence, can be a material.

– Martínez once said.

In his hands, absence becomes radiant.

Poetics of Invisibility

Martínez’s work isn’t forensic. It doesn’t claim to expose. Instead, it feels—viscerally, lyrically—the residue of systemic violence. He is not photographing the crime; he is photographing the echo.

Violence here is not spectacle. It is something whispered, inherited, ambient. The images ache with what they cannot show. They are maps of psychological rupture, crafted in chiaroscuro. You could call it mystical, but that would miss the politics underneath.

The hill of La Garza, the firework in the poppy field—these are not just poetic symbols. They are battlegrounds between ancestral memory and contemporary despair.

We don’t see death, but its omnipresence is felt throughout.

– reads the series statement.

A New Language for Collective Grief

Martínez is part of a growing group of Latin American photographers reshaping how we process violence. They work in symbols, silences, and speculative forms. His work joins the ranks of Alfredo Jaar, Teresa Margolles, and Doris Salcedo—not in medium, but in mission: to build a visual language for loss that resists flattening.

Recognition has followed. He’s received the Magnum Emergency Fund, participated in the Joop Swart Masterclass, and been a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant. But Martínez’s work lives outside the gallery’s white sanctum. It is carried in the breath of those who recognize their own loss in the stars he punctures.

There’s a cruel lyricism in the idea that the dead light our path. Martínez doesn’t console us with beauty. He insists on its dissonance. Luciérnagas is not catharsis. It’s a quiet resistance—against forgetting, against invisibility, against the world’s appetite for erasure.

Each photograph is a visual prayer. Each puncture a litany of names we may never know. And each shimmer a defiant reminder: even in darkness, someone remembers.