Next weekend The Photobook Club Collective and I will be in Bristol attending BOP, this is the annual photobook festival organised by the Martin Parr Foundation. It is only the third year they’ve run the event and it is rapidly becoming the most popular in the U.K.
Last year we that is The Photobook Club Collective (the group I founded in 2017) took a rather large table in the main event space and we left our mark indelibly on it.
Some said, (Martin Parr himself) that we were one of the major highlights of the fair. And in fact it’s one of the reasons we are back this year with an even bigger presence.
This is partially because we have an ongoing partnership with the Royal Photographic Society so we’ll have a table in the foyer of RPS House with a selection of our books plus a digital exhibition running of our work at the same time.
Also Martin asked me and other members of The Photobook Club to please bring back that collective energy to the main event space, so we also have a presence alongside the many other great photobook and zine publishers, such as The Photobook Cafe, Gost, Dewi Lewis, Overlapse and Aperture.
On Saturday (the 8th) we are doing a huge group book signing with all the photographers who are attending this year. It starts at 3pm in the main event space at Paintworks and as you can see from the poster below, we have 25 photographers showing their publications so it’s likely to be a pretty lively occasion so definitely come along.
Something remarkable happens when you put a lot of artists in a small space, taking my experience at the Royal Academy earlier this year into account, the collective energy and positive vibes rise and this enthusiasm becomes infectious, it’s a buzz that will last the weekend.
In addition you can see Kalpesh Lathigra give a talk on the Friday (7th) at 6.30pm at RPS House, this is part of the talk series I curated for the Royal Photographic Society in which our members would give a presentation about their work. More details here.
And Alys Tomlinson will be giving a talk on Sunday morning (9th) about her new book, The Islanders which will be worth booking in for.
BOP takes place over the weekend of October 8th and 9th over three venues in the Paintworks site.
The main event space, the RPS and the Martin Parr Foundation itself.
You can follow updates on our Instagram page here.
Here are more details about the fair itself.
You can support the photographers taking part through our Linktree too.
Hope to see you there.
Tom
Broadbentius' Blog 