Great to be able to share this… on Wednesday 17th May at 7-9 Barcelona time (UTC+1), 9 Photobook Clubs from around the world will take part in a streamed event as part of the Widephoto, CCCB and Foto Colectania organised discussions on the Photobook Phenomenon. For all the information and streaming details check out the links below…
Photobook Club Brisbane
Photobook Club Barcelona
Photobook México
Photobook Club Jakarta
Photobook Club Madeira
Photobook Club Madrid
Photobook Club Montevideo
Photobook Club San Sebastian
Photobook Club Bristol
Really looking forward to some time in Barcelona next week. I will be heading over to launch Code-X; Paper, Pixel, Screen and Ink with the bookRoom (UCA Farnham) at Arts Libris. The book brings together some great voices who are playing with, responding to, and generally trying to make sense of the sometimes chaotic changes the codex is going through. The chapter I contributed is titled ‘The Photobook Club; a pragmatic response to hierarchical conversations and the photobook as capital‘ and is available in the book (of course) and soon online.
News from one of the longest running Photobook Club branches via Markus Furgber…
Today we had the 12th meeting at Photobookclub Barcelona. It was the last one organized by Jon Uriarte. Thank you very much, Jon. We had a lot of fun at the 12 meetings and will have still more in the upcoming ones. Now Paco Navamuel, Carlos Pericás, Lea Tyrallová and Oscar Ciutat will be the people in charge of organizing future meetings.
The Box of Books arrived this week in Barcelona and there was a special meetup that Jon Uriarte organized themed around the box, which also coincided with the branch’s 10th meetup!
There are a few word below from Jon followed by images via Oscar Ciutat…
We had prepared a outdoors meet-up at Montjuic (a mountain/park) but because of a heavy storm with a lot of rain and thunders, we finally met at the CFD, a documentary photography school who kindly let us met at their space. It was great to have books brought by nobody, because it allowed at even more open and sincere discussion about the books than when they are brought by the participants.
The longest standing branch of the Photobook Club based in Barcelona and run by Jon Uriarte has just had it’s 7th meetup held at Foto Colectania, a big thanks to Markus Furgber for sharing this report and also the images of the event shared below;
The seventh meeting of Photobook Club Barcelona took place on Tuesday, 9th of October. This time we moved to Foto Colectania, a private foundation, dedicated to collecting, conserving and exhibiting fine art photography. The collection is specialized in Spanish and Portuguese photographers from the early fifties up to now.
About 30 enthusiastic photobook fans gathered together around the large white table. Jon Uriarte hadn’t given us any theme for this meeting, so everyone was free to introduce one of their favourite photobooks. The selection was great and very interesting. The variety of authors and themes was impressive. One of the highlights was “Lisboa, triste y alegre“, a first edition, presented by Pepe Font de Mora, president of the foundation.
Great news for photobook lovers in New York – Helka Aleksdóttir is running a meet next weekend on Saturday 25th in Brooklyn. For more information on the event and to RSVP (as space is limited) please head over to the event page here.
Meanwhile in Barcelona….
Jon Uriarte, who does an awesome job organizing the Photo Book Club Barcelona meetings got in touch with news on a ‘gastro meeting’ held yesterday and the upcoming event with Steidl screening:
Yesterday we celebrated a special session: Photo+gastronomic+book Club at Elgoibar ( close to San Sebastián). It was gastronomic because after sharing books, we also had lunch together. We had a “photographic menu”, first a Fontcuberta Soup (it look like a chicken soup but it wasn’t…), an Elliot Erwitt black and white rice, Gregory Crewdson sorbet and a Jeff Wall cake. We had a great time, participants brought great books, such as Ortiz Echagüe’s Tipos y Trajes published in 1957.
Next Wednesday 29 at 19:30 we will have our regular meet-up in Bcn, this time there wont be a guest but instead a screening of the documentary “How to make a book with Steidl”. So, we will be seeing the movie, talking about it and discussing about photobooks that were made by editors instead of photographers.
If you want to get to one of the Photo Book Club Barcelona’s regular meetings (and why wouldn’t you?) you can get in touch via their Facebook page here.
Thanks to Makus Furgber for writing this piece on last weekends meet-up in Spain, looks like it was a fantastic event.
The third Photobookclub meeting in Barcelona was a huge success! The introduction on Richard Billingham’s “Ray’s a Laugh” made by made Ricardo Cases was very interesting and spiced with his personal humor. He also raised more than a laugh! We discussed the possibility of intimacy and its limits in such extremely “intimate” photos and the floating frontier between intimacy and exhibitionism. His photos were related to his historical context by Photobookclub members, who had lived in Great Britain and confirmed a depressing social situation, which Richard Billingham reflected in his family pictures.
The second part of the meeting was devoted to introducing several books brought by the participants. The books covered a wide range of authors, topics and formats. There were also some self-edited books. I can only remember Jon Uriarte’s self-edited book dedicated to foreign graveyards.
The Photo Book Club Barcelona meets once again tomorrow night. Unfortunately (but in a great way) all the places have already been taken, and there is currently a waiting list for these meetings!
Those who are lucky enough to go to the event: I would love to hear a review of the evening, from a participants point of view ( matt@photobookclub.org )
The ‘Photo Book Club Barcelona’ community is continuing to grow and just this week, held it’s second photobook meet-up in the city. This time attendees were discussing the design aspects of their favorite books as well as being joined by Carlos Albalá, co-editor of the spanish independent publishing house BSide Books who introduced Daniel Blaufuks’ Terezin photobook.
A few images from the event can be seen below, and if you are in town and would like to meet up with this growing group of photobook fans, head on over to their Facebook page to get all the details.