Alex Llovet – Summer’s Almost Gone

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Alex Llovet’s photobook Summer’s Almost Gone is a family album of sorts. The monochrome photos were taken on family vacations from 2016 to 2021. We see the natural world and children in nature, as well as a few photos of adults, presumably Llovet and his wife.

I say “of sorts” above because of how the photos are presented and work. Although they were taken at specific times and places, and to their participants they must represent particular events and memories, in the context of the book they become mysterious and metaphorical.

The photos are grouped into 24 fold-out panels, each a separate quadriptych of four similar or unrelated images. Between the fold-outs, the backs of the pages are printed with faint, ghostly versions of the photographs on the other side. The effect is evocative and spooky, like seeing an afterimage of something that has just disappeared.

The four photos in each panel work together to tell you something – if not stories then hints and suggestions – and each panel adds its cumulative visual weight to the developing narrative of the subsequent panels. The photos in the panels offer contrasting, pleasing patterns of subject and detail, of lights and darks, of textures and forms, and of planes and lines.

Interspersed among the photos are texts by Lara Moreno in Spanish and English that like good poetry resonate in multiple directions. They are addressed to an unnamed other person, and they evoke details of shared summer experiences, the passage of time, the fragility of the present, and a special closeness and bond.

The beautifully printed tri-tone photos do not appear to be arranged chronologically. All seem to be from the high point of summer. We see plants – the forest, trees, vines, flowers, leaves – as well as animals – birds, snails, frogs, swans, a snake, a dragonfly, a horse’s eye, a spiderweb. We see gardening tools, home-grown tomatoes, and a hammock. We see children enjoying nature. They explore, swim, relax, hold tiny frogs, slide on wet plastic, make shadows with their hands, and walk on a tightrope. In contrast the few adults we see look tired and careworn.

Perhaps the adults – the parents – are mourning the easy times of summer, aware that soon their relaxed vacation routine will be replaced by stress and hurry, by work and school, by cold and winter, and by inside activities in urban settings. And maybe they realize that their days of parenting young children will soon be over, that in a few years their kids will grow up and start their separate lives. Thinking of the days and years ahead, their joy like ours is mixed with melancholy.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

PhotoBook Journal has also reviewed Alex Llovet’s Beware of the Dog.

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Alex Llovet – Summer’s Almost Gone

Photographer: Alex Llovet (Spanish, born 1974, lives in Barcelona)

Language: Spanish and English

Text: Lara Moreno

Design: underbau

Printing: Artefacto

Hardcover with inset cover photo; Swiss binding; 94 photographs; 216 pages; 15 x 22 cm; ISBN 978-84-128174-8-5

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.