In Latin America, photobooks are the result of a fortunate encounter between the artisanal process of making artists’ books and medium-scale printing. For more than twenty years, small publishing houses, bookstores and design workshops have proliferated in all parts of the continent to offer imagined possibilities to photographers.
On this occasion PUNTO DE FUGA joins Infinitos Lugares to present UNIVERSO FOTOLIBRO, a traveling exhibition of Latin American books made to reflect on the act of reading image books. What does it mean to read in images? What are the reading possibilities of such a book? Is there anything that can precede the image in these cases? Whatever the answer each visitor gives to these questions, UNIVERSO FOTOLIBRO proposes a cartography of the Latin American photography book, in which it reveals unusual possibilities of approaching these books while tearing, unfolding, organizing, touching, messing up or turning the pages. Each gesture of the reader responds to an action that is indicated at the epicenter of each of these centers of meaning.
In UNIVERSO FOTOLIBRO, the action verbs invite us to approach the book from the gesture first, until we reach the deepest layers that these books may contain when they dialogue with each other.
When one observes each book in detail, one discovers that behind each story one can see and feel the tensions, the contradictions and the most recent approaches to the history of Latin America. The potential of all these photobooks lies precisely in the strength in which design and content were united to weave life stories and express the richness of a continent.
This exhibition transfers to the world of books, reading formats and interpretation of images that writers like Julio Cortázar or John Berger had done in their time. One sought in Rayuela, the possibility of offering the reader multiple ways to approach a novel while the other uncovered the need to think the meaning of images before the existence of words. On this occasion it will be the books, in their multiple dimensions of expression and content, that will speak for themselves of the continent and its time.
This exhibition is co-produced by PUNTO DE FUGA BOGOTÁ and Infinitos Lugares in Bogotá, Colombia, with the support, advice and collaboration of Fiebre Photobook, Palermo and our allied bookstore in Madrid.
Laura Carbonell & Laura Bernal