The editing of photobooks

What happens when an author and their editor open to the public the table where, for years, they have been thinking about and building books together?

The photobook is one of the richest and most complex ways of thinking about contemporary photography. Unlike a single image conceived for a wall, a screen, or a digital feed, the book turns photography into an articulated language. Images stop working solely through their individual strength and begin to produce meaning through their relationships: sequence, rhythm, design, and the materiality of the object.

This masterclass sets out to explore the photobook as a space for constructing meaning, where editing is equivalent to writing with images, and every decision — from the order of the photographs to the typography, format, or paper — takes part in creating a visual and conceptual experience. At its core is editing understood not as a technical selection of “the best photographs,” but as a form of thinking. In a photobook, the value of an image is relational: a seemingly minor photograph can hold up an entire sequence, while a powerful image can break the balance of the whole. Editing means making narrative decisions, creating tensions, introducing silences, and building a journey the reader experiences page by page.

A shared methodology opening to the public for the first time

Alejandro Cartagena and Fernando Gallegos are author and editor, but also longtime collaborators and companions. Over the years they have worked together on numerous editorial projects, building a way of working based on trust, dialogue, the clash of ideas and, at times, disagreement.

For the first time, they will bring this joint working method to a masterclass: a process that usually unfolds in the privacy of the studio will, over these two sessions, be laid out in front of the group. The experience will be rounded off by the talk they will both give on Saturday afternoon as part of the Fiebre program, in which they will look back on their shared journey and reveal some of the decisions, lessons, and complicities that have shaped their collaboration.

How will the masterclass work?

This is not conceived as a theoretical class or a workshop with predetermined solutions, but as an open conversation between two editors and photographers with their own distinct perspectives. Fernando and Alejandro will think out loud in front of participants’ projects: at times their readings will complement each other, and at other times they will come into tension.

The central exercise will be collective and take place in real time. Together with the group, they will edit, design, and build a first dummy of each project presented. Participants will be able to step in, propose, question, and adjust the decisions being made, observing how the physical and conceptual handling of the images transforms the meaning of the project.

The process will cover:

• Aesthetic response: how we understand photography and how a book can help communicate a body of work.
• Selection and overall concept: what is this project really about?
• The sequence of images and the construction of rhythm, tension, and silence.
• Image pairings and their formal, conceptual, and chromatic relationships.
• Page layout: how format, cropping, bleed, or white space alter the meaning and rhythm of the book.
• The laws of perception and their influence on the relationship between images.
• Scale, paper, texture, weight, transparency, and binding as conceptual decisions.
• Graphic design and typography in correspondence with the project’s meaning.
• Creating a language of one’s own: a visual and material logic coherent with the content.
• Reference photobooks and solutions drawn from other disciplines such as music, film, poetry, or literature.

What will participants take away?

• A direct experience of the editorial process as thinking-in-progress, not as an already-resolved outcome.
• Two different — and at times conflicting — readings of the same set of images.
• Conceptual and practical tools for reviewing their narrative and their own photographic practice.
• A first photobook dummy as a tangible result of the working process.