Almost all his images were produced at night, using the aprons' floodlights, moonlight or long exposures of between ten minutes to two hours. The airports on the Azores are unique. In order that they would not be spotted from the air during wartime they are amongst the very few black-tarred runways in the world, and it is the relationship between the dark tarmac and the fluorescent painted signs and runway markings that lie at the heart of some of Martins' most arresting images. This unusual combination allowed him to produce incredibly abstract images, with a very long depth of field and often with the use of minimal lighting. In some, sky and ground merge in darkness with only the lights and airport hieroglyphics to orient us. Yet even these are hard to decode, for whilst this is a landscape of signs that can be read by the knowledgeable - pilots and air traffic controllers, for instance - it remains perplexing to the uninitiated. This juxtaposition of sign and shape are at the heart of these remarkable images.

This book, winner of the prestigious European Publishers Award for Photography, incorporates Catany's stunning recent work, and features portraits, nudes and still lives. Extraordinarily sensual and sumptuous, these photographs were achieved by a technique which Catany developed, and which is based on the original Calotype process first used by W.H. Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography. This special technique and the resultant photography have led to considerable international acclaim for Catany, whose work has shown in more than 115 solo exhibitions in major galleries throughout the world.

Winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize 2003; Naglaa Walker has established herself as one of the most exciting young artists to emerge in recent years in the UK. Since 2000 her work has been seen in more than 25 exhibitions in the UK, Europe and the United States. Before taking an MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art, Naglaa Walker trained as a scientist, and worked briefly as a Physics researcher. She draws on this background, using diptyches which juxtapose blackboard images of chalked equations with carefully staged photographic images, enabling the viewer to make connections between the abstraction of physical laws and the reality of experience.