Medium Photo – Pop-up fair – PhotoBook Journal

2023 has started to see the re-emergence of in-person art & book fairs, one of which we participated at was hosted by Medium Photo as part of their Medium Festival of Photography, extended over multiple locations in San Diego during the first two weeks of April. Last Saturday, April 1st was the Community Pop-up event held in the Barrio Logan area in south San Diego in the Bread & Salt facility.

This was a multi-faceted event; photographers, book shops, publishers, camera stores and all things related to photography, with a heavy emphasis on photobooks. In one regard, getting the photographic community reengaged again this was a well attended day, not crazy-bonkers like the LA Art Book Fair has been in the past, while not a ghost town either thinking of the mid-COVID crisis days.

One of the interesting aspects of this event location was the book display of the winners of the Paris-Aperture Photo Book Awards (2022), which can be overwhelming in an attempt to examine all of these. Fortunately we have reviewed a few of these already here on PBJ, including the Catalog of the Year, Devour the Land, as well as a few others which made the final cut; Florian Bachmeier’s In Limbo (First Book Award), and Marc Schroeder’s Order 7161, while we expect to publish the First Book Award of Gabriella Angotti-Jones I Just Wanna Surf fairly soon. Some of the books are considered too fragile for handling, thus a number of the titles were under plexiglass, which can be frustrating to see but not really experience. Likewise, the remaining books are available for browsing, but are firmly attached to the display boards, so the reading experience of these book objects is still a little limited. Nevertheless, it was really nice opportunity to see all of these great books in one location here in Southern California with a big thanks to the Medium Photo team making this a reality.

We had a PhotoBook Journal information and donation table that I shared with my own artist book selling efforts. And as you might suspect, we came away with some interesting books that we will feature at some time in the near future here.

All in all, it was a wonderful opportunity to interact and exchange ideas with the southern California community at large again and I am assuming that this will be a stronger event and presence in the years to come.

Below; Jason Reimer with his recently published Excavation: A Journey Through Loss, Mike Slack, publisher of The Ice Plant as well as representing Aperture, Hiroshi Watanabe with his table of published photobooks, Chris Maliwat with his recently published Subwaygram, which will be reviewed on PBJ shortly, Oriana Poindexter, an ocean scientist and cyanotype printer and our own table.

Articles and photographs published on PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s).