Summer's Almost Gone - special edition
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Special edition of 42 copies of the book including an original photograph (16×24 cm printed on Hahnemühle paper), numbered and signed by the author.
Over the last ten years, Alex Llovet's work has been structured around two main themes: identity and memory. Using the photobook format to conceptualise and present his projects increasingly focused on his immediate environment -his partner, his daughters and the territory he inhabits-, he has constructed his own universe in which the photographic document and the poetic image constantly intertwine and question each other.
Is it possible to long for something that is still happening? This is the starting point of Summer's Almost Gone, one hundred images taken during the summers of 2016 to 2021, in different places in England and Spain, which make up his own unique family album of the summer holidays. During these periods of contact with nature, synonymous with freedom, discovery and play, but also with challenges, growth and confrontation with one's own ghosts, Llovet appeals to the awareness of the fugacity of life while questioning the limitations of photographic practice in the face of the frustration of not being able to be both actor and spectator at the same time.
If our memory constructs an autobiographical narrative from unconnected fragments, filling in the gaps with our imagination, the editing of this work, based more on sensation than on reason, acts in the same way, using 24 sequences structured in the form of quadriptychs of images that behave like vertical frames of a fake documentary, that of the author's life. After six years of work and five different dummies, this book is the formal culmination of a poetic and conceptual investigation in which the layout on the page brings to mind how memory itself works: veiled images, moments we barely remember, pages that the reader must unfold in order to peer into the windows of the past.
Accompanying the images, the poetic prose of the writer Lara Moreno speaks to us from the photographer's point of view, weaving a subtle parallel narrative that evokes the recollection of those summers.
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Specifications
Special edition: 42 copies
Photographs, concept and editing: Alex Llovet
Text: Lara Moreno (in English and Spanish )
Design: underbau
Pre-press: Josep Maria de Llobet
15 x 22 cm
94 tritone photographs
216 pages (24 foldouts)
Printing: Grafilur
Swiss hardback binding with paper-covered hardcover and exposed spine
Publication date: July 2022---
Press / Awards
- ArtsLibris Award, Banc de Sabadell Foundation 2023
- Shortlisted PhotoESPAÑA best national photography book 2023
- Winner Best photobook PoyLatam 2023
- Shortlisted for the Eloi Gimeno Award 2023
- Shortlisted Best photobook FELIFA 2023
- Best book of Arles 2022 - Tipibookshop.
- Shortlisted Best Independent book - Lucie Photo Book Prize 2022
- Selected among the 10 best books of Arles 2022 by "Le Plac'Art Photo"
- "A really wonderful book, beautifully made. Congratulations." - David Campany, curator.
- Delicate and powerful". - Aurélie de Lanlay, co-director of the Arles festival.
- "A splendid book, calmly elegiac, about the passage and persistence of time, about the power of bodily experiences, about what connects and returns everyone to their ontological solitude, and about what makes it possible to approach the future as an enigma without drama." - Fabien Rivery, L'intervalle.
- "A puzzle of beauty that transcends all seasons. Unique and at the same time personal for each reader; Llovet manages to caress our memories by flooding us with the transversal rhyme of a family -his own- that seems to be ours, that of all of us. If we add to this a precise design and texts together with an elegant and exquisite edition, we are in front of a real marvel. A ten." - Raúl Marín, creatiBEty
-"The photographer’s tries to see with the eyes of a child, full of surprise, but his adult awareness of life’s fugacity crawls into the cracks, adding complexity and weigh to the warmth of summer days." - Blind Magazine