FORMAT23: Photobook Market

Description

Derby Museum And Art Gallery, The Strand, Derby, DE1 1BS.

Over the last few years, we have seen a lot of experimentation with photobooks. They are objects that we obsess over, sometimes even fetishise. We are bombarded by digital images daily, but the photobook provides a more intimate experience. Normally in a photobook market, the dominant sense is sight, but specialists in photobook-making use almost all the senses. The absence of one sense, for example sight, can enhance our imagination and allow us to conceive a new perspective on the photobook. What has gone unseen and what are we yet to discover? How much do we use the five senses for making a photobook? And for buying? We want to explore a photobook through our senses, experiencing the photobook publicly the same way we do privately, saying in public what we say  

The FORMAT23 Photobook Market and Exhibition will be dedicated to the sensorial experience of the photobook, performing and discovering the book's format and elements. In this coming edition, we want to expand the Photobook Market experience into something much more. Alongside the FORMAT Photobook Market, which will include a space for selling/buying, presenting and signing books, we will create a space for photobook performance; for groups to create new work; for audiences to engage in workshops, artist talks; ad finally a place to meet and share knowledge.  

The photobook experience open call sort photographers, artists, designers, curators, performers, musicians, publishers, printers, writers, archivists, collectors and collectives for the first Sensorial Photobook experience. We searched for: photobooks, augmented photobooks, NFT photobooks, ASMR video/audio, photographs, performance about photobooks and the making of them. We asked applicants to share testimonials and experiences of the photobook by isolating the sensory perceptions (taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell) and by performing photobooks through the senses and gesture.  

We welcomed diverse and imaginative video and sound works that open our perceptions of what makes the photobook. In order to make a magnificent three-day experience that explored the questions ‘what the photobook can be’, we also welcome publishers which showed the development of the photobook and its challenges and opportunities in this digital age, from independent and commercial, to handmade as well as self-published.  

The FORMAT23 Photobook Market will take place in Derby during the festival’s opening weekend, Friday 16th March – Sunday 19th March. The three-day event will bring together publishers, bookshops, artists and photographers from across the globe.