Just A Photobook About People Looking At Photobooks

This fanzine-format photobook is a labour of love but also, as its author puts it, “a little act of mischief.” In his new publication, Alex Llovet once again surprises us with a body of work made over the past six years using his mobile phone. Direct and unpretentious photography, yet full of humanity, affection, humour, and sensitivity.

In his own words: "In 2018, together with Josep Maria de Llobet, I founded Ediciones Posibles, a small independent publishing house specialising in photobooks. Shortly afterwards, we became fairgoers and began travelling from city to city, loaded with books, to bring our publications closer to the public at specialised festivals.

The photobook world is as small as it is inward-looking, and at its fairs publishers, distributors, photographers, collectors and, in general, people united by the same fascination come together. From the beginning, I started photographing with my mobile phone what was happening around us, with the sole intention of getting images for social media, small traces of life that would explain where we were and what we were doing. Fairs have their own rhythms and their own stories: among boxes of books, tables, conversations, waiting and walks through the stands, curious scenes would unfold that caught my attention.

This summer, at the Arles Books Fair, one of them happened: a young man, rigorously dressed in black, was walking through the aisles leafing through publications. With one hand he turned the pages and with the other he held, at head height, a large piece of watermelon. Without hesitation I turned on my phone to take a couple of photographs, when suddenly something clicked: it was the moment when I became aware that I had been accumulating for years an archive of scenes, gestures and characters, but above all that these images meant something more than a simple involuntary collection of anecdotes. They were the testimony of a community and of a way of relating to books, to photography and to the people who revolve around them: the portrait of a small universe, that of photobook fairs.

I immediately began to look through the photographs stored on my phone, and one detail caught my attention: the phrases that appeared on the tote bags carried by some visitors, containers waiting for their books, or already carrying them, although we can only guess what is inside from the angular shapes they create. We know they are carrying them, but not which ones, although perhaps we might be able to guess. There is a clear relationship between people and the messages they carry around in their bags, but also a mysterious correspondence between each of them and the books they choose to buy. Certain individuals seem to attract certain publications, and this connection manifests itself in the way they dress, style their hair or walk, but also in the type of images or the physical finish of the book they choose to leaf through: its size, its materials or its colour. Perhaps these are arbitrary associations, but observed again and again they end up constructing a kind of secret catalogue of affinities.

This publication is born from those photographs, those journeys, those people and the small incidents that happen while, around a table, someone opens a book and someone else stops to look at it. It is an informal and somewhat chaotic archive, like the fairs themselves, but above all an affectionate one. A walk through this tiny world, observed from within and, ultimately, my small tribute to all those who share our passion for this strange, intimate and very special object that we call the photobook."

This publication includes photos from the following photobook fairs:

ArtsLibris, Fiebre Photobook Festival, Recreo Valencia Art Book Fair, Revela’t Contemporary Analog Photography Festival, Sant Jordi at Alalimon Gallery, Terranova and Villa Alegre, Rubí Art Festival and ArtPhoto BCN (Spain); Arles Photobook Fair, Polycopies Paris and Montolieu Photobook (France); SurArtexArte (Argentina); CCE (Uruguay); Photobooks Switzerland (Switzerland) and Leipzig Photobook Festival (Germany).