Photography historian Horacio Fernández says that books are simple objects, just paper and ink, but where everything fits, including the unlimited universe that exists in their pages. These objects have been with us for several hundred years. And, for some time now, they coexist with the systematic omen that announces a death that, as is evident, does not come. There are multiple reasons that could help us understand why the publishing market, although it suffers the changes and challenges of the current era, resists. Just because it resists does not mean that it does not do so without effort or, sometimes, even with difficulty. But there are many successful initiatives that celebrate the fact of creating, disseminating or enjoying books of all types and conditions.
The Fiebre Photobook Festival decided, more than ten years ago, to adopt this communal and celebratory form to dedicate itself to the dissemination of a special tandem: the fertile union between paper and the photographic image. Perhaps this is not the place to replicate aspirational stories that insist on maintaining how many of the most brilliant commercial projects seem to emerge from the prodigious minds of a group of young entrepreneurs, crammed into the garage of a house, on the outskirts of some city. But something of that scenario did occur in the emergence of the Photobook Fever platform: overcrowding. Because this initiative was born within a small photography school located in Madrid: BlankPaper Escuela. Although the place was minimal due to its size (compared to other institutions that, at the beginning of the 2000s, were in charge of training in photography), a set of actions and people emerged from its classrooms who, along with many others, professionals of national photography, have been supporting, energizing and internationalizing the photography of the Spanish state for more than a decade.
The Fiebre platform, co-directed by Miren Pastor and Bonifacio Barrio Hijosa since its inception, has changed shape over the years and is now revealed as a multidisciplinary space that brings together an annual fair for the sale and purchase of photobooks, meetings and discussions with leading agents in the photography sector, a prize for the development and publication of a photographic work and an online library that houses (pay attention) more than 1,100 photobooks for public consultation. This platform is developed in conjunction with well-known collaborators in the photography context such as the publishing house Dalpine, Artes Gráficas Palermo, La Troupe or the Photobook Club Madrid, among others. But also with a strong community of people who support the initiative and who last weekend met (with more than 8,000 visitors) at the eleventh edition of the festival.
It was not just any occasion. The previous year was the only one in the history of the festival where the event could not be held due to the lack of financial support required to organise events of this kind in a city like Madrid, where cultural management is an endless feat. Between stands selling photographic fanzines and workshops for students already well versed in visual culture, there was space for the presentation of some publications to which it is worth dedicating a few lines.
A few data are enough to understand the magnitude of the recent emergence of Searching for the impossible. An anthology of texts on the origin of photography (Martí Llorens and Rebecca Mutell, eds.; Ana Galán, trans.): one hundred texts, most of them translated for the first time into Spanish, by 46 authors who, between 1816 and 1844, managed to invent photography. The three very complete volumes that make up this publication are accompanied by an incalculable amount of notes, comments, extra information and appreciations from their authors and translators made available not only to fans of this surprising stage of photography, but also to a research community. that, through this valuable work, you can consult many of these writings for the first time.
From a textbook it became a book of books that repeats the canon of those manuals intended to compile notable photobooks in the national histories of photography. Photography books in Portugal: From the Revolution to the Present (David-Alexandre Guéniot, Filipa Valladares, José Luís Neves, Susana Lourenço Marques, eds.) commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that put an end to those four endless decades of Estado Novo in Portugal. This work brings together 88 photobooks of the neighbouring country created from 1977 to the present day. A The Photobook: A History that tries to organize and make visible, outside its own borders, the captivating and little-known scene of Portuguese photography.
If something has always characterized this festival, it is precisely its festive atmosphere. That is why it is not surprising that one of the most popular presentations was that of the fanzines Party Party The collection was launched in 2010 by photographer Ricardo Cases and designer Natalia Troitiño. The collection already has fourteen issues and is still active awaiting the next project to take shape in the simple 32 pages that make up each issue. The democratisation of a practice such as buying photography in different formats (where collecting can be a high-risk activity) is the hallmark of these small books on sale for 10 euros, in runs of a handful of copies and bagged in paper envelopes as if they were a couple of apples. Needless to say, both the selection of the works, as well as their layout and the design of each issue are the result of the relevant knowledge, in photography, of the people involved in its publication.
These publications (and many others) allow us to look at and reflect collectively on the photographic act and on the themes and interests of a group of people who put their talent, energy and time at the service of photography, a means of communication and expression that, by the way, is not going extinct either. If, as Sontag predicted, it seems that in this day and age everything we do is destined to culminate in a photographic image, let at least that snapshot be the portrait of an initiative as necessary and as beautiful as this one.
