What Is a Photobook?
with Gonzalo Golpe and Juanjo Justicia

At some point you’ve probably come across a book full of photographs. Maybe you’ve held a publication in your hands and weren’t quite sure how to label it. Or perhaps there’s a volume (or several) on your bookshelf that you return to again and again, to revisit those scenes, those portraits, those images. Photography has always had a close relationship with print: from family albums to exhibition catalogues, from postcards to newspapers and magazines. And then there are photobooks, which seem to bring all these visual traditions together. We’re still not entirely sure whether they’re a format, a genre or a device. What we do know is that they’re hard to define, so in this episode we’re going to give it a try.

Photos & Books: Stories of a Scopic Drive

The first podcast on photobooks in Spain

Written and hosted by Nieves Limón and Marta Martín
Produced by Fiebre Photobook
Recorded at La República Independiente de la Radio
Actividad subvencionada por @culturagob
Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU

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Photobooks cited VISIT THE LIBRARY

Curso Discurso Gonzalo Golpe, Ricardo Báez y Alejandro Marote

CURSO DISCURSO [Course and Speech] is a rare, unusual book that is difficult to classify and even more difficult to define. Typologically speaking, it could be described as a poetic essay on photographic books and visual language that uses design and photography to project itself, to gain meaning, while also speaking about itself. There is […]

2020 Cabeza de Chorlito

Manifiesto antitético [Antithetical Manifesto] Gonzalo Golpe y Marina Meyer

A book by Gonzalo Golpe and Marina Meyer Antithetical Manifesto is a visual essay that can be read as a questioning of the publishing medium or as a declaration of love. Probably both at the same time, since it is well known that love often thrives on conflict. Before it was a book, paper bound […]

2024 Comisura

Atestado [Report] Gonzalo Golpe

This story is pieced together from a mysterious sequence of photos from a police report, interspersed with the voice of a woman stirring in the shadows. A hybrid fiction with which Gonzalo Golpe examines the ethics of photojournalism, a questioning that is perhaps more necessary today than ever. A love story marked by fatality, which […]

2021 Cabeza de Chorlito

When the Wind Gonzalo Golpe

The Y2K bug generated fear of technology, but it turned out to be unfounded. Today, the fear of artificial intelligence has emerged, and Gonzalo Golpe uses AI as a tool to create a melancholic work, reminding us that imagination and poetry are in people, not devices.

2023 La Fábrica

Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions Anna Atkins

The first book to be photographically printed and illustrated, Photographs of British Algae was published in fascicles beginning in 1843 and is a landmark in the history of photography. Using specimens she collected herself or received from other amateur scientists, Atkins made the plates by placing wet algae directly on light-sensitized paper and exposing the […]

1843 Selfpublished

The Pencil of Nature William Henry Fox Talbot

Issued in fascicles from June 1844 through April 1846, The Pencil of Nature contained twenty-four plates, a brief text for each, and an introduction that described the history and chemical principles of Talbot’s invention. The photographs and texts proposed, with extraordinary prescience, a wide array of applications for the medium that included reproducing rare prints […]

1844 Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans

The Pillar Stephen Gill

A pillar stuck in the ground beside a stream in a flat, open landscape, trees and houses visible in the distance, under a vast sky. That is the backdrop for all of Stephen Gill’s photographs in this book. We see the same landscape in spring and summer, in autumn and winter, we see it in […]

2019 Nobody Books

Sons of the Living Bryan Schutmaat

Sons of the Living is a photobook about the land and people along the highways of America’s deserts. Photographed over the course of a decade in the American West’s arid and sweeping terrain, this work depicts a human capacity for endurance. Schutmaat offers an updated view of the “open road” that addresses a new era […]

2024 Trespasser

Les Americains [The Americans] Robert Frank

In the nearly seven decades since its publication in France in 1958 by Robert Delpire, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting […]

1958 Delpire

Café Lehmitz Anders Petersen

Photographer Anders Petersen was hanging out at a dive bar on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in 1968 when someone grabbed his camera from the table where he was sitting and started taking pictures. Petersen used the opportunity to photograph the culprit—and the rest of the bar’s motley crew of patrons. The resulting project is one […]

1978 Schirmer/Mosel

Une double absence Akihito Yoshida

A true photographic narrative, this book tells the story of a young man, Daiki, whose life was entirely devoted to his grandmother, Yukimi. Fascinated and touched by this unique relationship, photographer Akihito Yoshida, Daiki’s cousin and also Yukimi’s grandson, decided to document their story. He photographed their daily life and, over the years, we see […]

2019 Éditions Xavier Barral

Italia o Italia Federico Clavarino

I was born and raised in Italy, but I always felt like a stranger. It wasn’t until I moved abroad at the age of twenty that I began to notice the place, trying to figure out why everything seemed so familiar and yet so strange to me. That’s when I decided to travel around the […]

2014 Akina Books

02/ La Vertigine Federico Clavarino

Vertigo is a change in an individual’s relationship with the space around them, perceived as a subtle feeling of dizziness. Vertigo can be seen simply as the fear of falling into the void. It is a condition in which we find ourselves deprived of our will, our intentions, and unable to attribute meaning and use […]

Fiesta ediciones

The Castle Federico Clavarino

Something more than just a group of nations or the designation of a geographical area, Europe can be understood as an idea, or a set of ideas. The idea of Europe shapes and fuels the history of a considerable part of our planet, starting from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire on to the great […]

2016 Dalpine

La Tierra Baldía Fernando Puche

In 1922, amid a world ravaged by the First World War, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a seminal poem that broke with poetic tradition. It was the angry cry of a generation facing the consequences of catastrophe. A hundred years later, Fernando Puche takes the pulse of today’s society, searching in the echoes […]

2022 Ediciones Posibles

Duelos y quebrantos Sebastián Bruno

“Between 2013 and 2017, I walked the 2,500 kilometres that make up the Don Quixote Route and other places in Castilla-La Mancha, covering the five provinces of the region: Albacete, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Toledo. In an attempt to create a timeless parallel between the society described by Cervantes and contemporary society, and thus […]

2018 Ediciones Anómalas

Algo Ahí Billy Hare

This series of images originated from the recording of moving shadows cast on an adobe wall. This vague and random stimulus seems to force the viewer to recognize human forms among the shadows, although that is only one of the possible “solutions.”

2016 KWY Ediciones

eden Bernardita Morello

The Eden was described in the biblical narration as a magic and charmed place, a lustful garden where the first man was born. That man, as he couldn’t resist the temptation, tasted the fruit of sin and he was dropped out from that place of wonders and perfection. Thousand of years have passed since that story […]

2016 Dalpine

Hombrecino (Little man) Susana Cabañero

For over 35 years, my grandfather carried with him a list of typed names in his wallet. They were neighbours and friends who had been executed at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and left abandoned in mass graves. Since I was a child, he would often read those names to me, emotionally, […]

Selfpublished

Bidean 2014 Miren Pastor

Bidean, que en euskera significa que algo o alguien está en el proceso o en el camino, representa el salto de la adolescencia a la vida adulta, buscando paralelismos entre las efímeras etapas vitales y los ciclos inestables de la naturaleza. Las tres autopublicaciones se han convertido en una herramienta clave para estructurar este proyecto […]

2014 Selfpublished

More episodes

EPISODE 0

The First Page With Cristina De Middel

EPISODE 2

Histories of the Photobook and the Contemporary Photobook in Spain With Javier Ortiz-Echagüe and Celia Vega

EPISODE 3

From Image to Book With Cristóbal Hara and Ricardo Cases

EPISODE 4

Visual Research and Narrative Modes With David Jiménez, Laia Abril and Joan Fontcuberta

EPISODE 5

Telling Stories with Photographs: Editing and Sequencing With Antonio M. Xoubanova, Alex Llovet and Montse Puig

EPISODE 6

The Militancy of Publishers With Juan Valbuena and Frédérique Bangerter

EPISODE 7

Collectivity in Photography With Julián Barón, Elisa Miralles and Paco Gómez

EPISODE 8

Preserving Our Heritage: Libraries, Archives and Collections With Javier Pérez Iglesias, Ane Abalde and Carmen Dalmau

EPISODE 9

Creating Experiences through Design and Print With Alberto Salván, Jaime Narváez and José Luis Martín Montesinos

EPISODE 10

Photobooks as a Way In: Teaching and Learning through the Photobook With Xavier Ribas, Fosi Vegue and Lúa Ribeira

Coming soon

Screenwriters and presenters

Nieves Limón

Nieves Limón is Associate Professor of Foundations of Photography and Audiovisual Formats at the Faculty of Communication of the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Her teaching and research have focused on the theory and analysis of the photographic image for more than a decade. She also cultivates a continued interest in documentary audiovisual practices. She was awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize for her PhD thesis, “Photographic Self-Representation Strategies. The Case of Frida Kahlo” (2014), and has published extensively in the field of photography. Her publications, which stem from her work and research stays in various national and international institutions (including the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, Sorbonne Université in Paris, Glasgow Caledonian University, Università degli Studi Roma Tre and Charles University in Prague), can be consulted via her ORCID profile. She has also sought to build bridges between academic knowledge and its transfer to broader social contexts, taking part in projects such as “Género y figura. Reivindicando a las mujeres fotógrafas”, contributing to photobook outreach (“Mirar de cerca. El fotolibro”, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) and working on archive research or exhibition curating (Casa Azul–Frida Kahlo Museum, Sala Ricardo Ortega). She is Co-PI of the research group ComPublic (Public Communication: Power, Law and Message) at UCLM.

Marta Martín Núñez

Marta Martín Núñez is Associate Professor of Photography and Narrative at the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, where she has developed a teaching and research career focused on contemporary Spanish photography, memory and visual narratives through the critical analysis of audiovisual discourse—topics on which she has published widely. She has been a resident at Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol and has undertaken research stays at the Hasselblad Foundation (Gothenburg), Roehampton University (London), the National Library of Spain and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía through Universidad Complutense de Madrid, as well as at New York University. She has been principal investigator on several competitive research projects funded through public calls and has led the creation of the Photographic Memory Archive of the Spanish Civil War, a project that recovers, analyses and preserves photographic production published in contemporary photobooks of memory and postmemory. This work has also taken the form of the exhibition Ecos de la memoria. Fotolibros del presente at the Museu de Belles Arts de Castelló in 2023, which travelled to Barcelona in 2024 and to Montpellier in 2025, funded by the Spanish Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with Parliament and Democratic Memory. She is co-editor-in-chief of L’Atalante. Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos and director of LabCom at UJI.