Photobook Mania

The second edition of this event dedicated to visual publishing will bring together a selection of international independent publishers, exhibitions, and much more.

Photobook Mania is part of the PhMuseum Days international photography festival, which this year focuses on the concept of the “Archipelago.” In an era of fragmentation and fluid boundaries, the photography projects, books, workshops, and panel discussions will create a space for “archipelagic thinking,” where aesthetic and conceptual diversities engage in dialogue within an open system.

In our selection of books, you will find the very recent publication by Nigel Baldacchino, The Only Distance, and Mango Season by Jenia Fridlyand.

Saturday, October 3rd, 5.30 pm

Book presentation The Only Distance,

by Nigel Baldacchino

with Nigel Baldacchino

self-published

The work for this book began in 2022. Baldacchino set out from an exploratory edit of disparate photographs made in the preceding years, which held, for him, a common charge: one he had long discerned traces of but had no words for, and was compelled by.

What the photographs held was a of the kind one has on re-entering a room where some pivotalevent took place long before: broad in what it gathers, exact in how it is recognized. It could be identified from within instantly and still be hard to anchor, or to describe entirely, even to oneself. Then he began going back out to photograph “from” it.

The final sequence, rather than the single photographs, expresses what we can now describe as a matter of distance. A single whole which contradictory qualities: an inner distance, a palpable tension, creating a sense of unjudging attention, close to what psychologists mean by “being seen”.

Sunday October 4th, 12 pm

Booksigning at our table of the book Mango Season

by Jenia Fridlyand

with Jenia Fridlyand

published by the Agency / Steidl, 2026

Jenia Fridlyand grew up in the Soviet Union in the years just prior to perestroika. Visiting Cuba in the second decade of the twenty-first century, then, felt like an uncanny homecoming. While both tangible and familiar, the grim fabric of the communist quotidian kept unravelling for Fridlyand under the bright, tropical sun. With a large-format camera and a photographic practice rooted in the American tradition, Fridlyand traveled throughout the island during several extended trips. She intuitively trained her lens on moments and scenes with the potential of holding both the known and the novel—from a pair of donkeys silhouetted against hilltops, a customer at a barber shop and a pair of rocking chairs seen through an open door, to drops of sweat on a man’s curved back and sweet fruit hanging ripe on a tree.