Immigrant and Protest Imagery Shine at NYC’s Photobook Fest

In a bustling Thursday evening preview of the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) annual Photobook Fest, held on the establishment’s Lower Manhattan location via Sunday, October 5, a number of cubicles appeared to seize and quell the anxieties of the current political second.

Among stacks of books of unconventional dimensions introduced by 70 publishers, full of images or image-related literature, it was the cubicles that introduced artwork off the web page and unabashedly into the political dialog that almost all enticed guests to flip via.

Spanning two open flooring, I heard Spanish spoken extra brazenly on the Photobook Fest than at another truthful I’ve been to this season.

On the second ground, I discovered Queens-based, Peruvian-American artist Nicole Motta attracting a crowd of attendees, who riffled via a choice of group household images. Motta stated she organized her exhibition on the truthful, Sin Poder No Hay Paraíso (Without Power There is No Paradise), in simply seven days.

Motta curated a choice of photos by 12 New York City artists, highlighting love and resistance, and printed them on white T-shirts, which fest-goers shuffled via as we spoke. She noticed the exhibition as a approach to reclaim energy via photos beneath threats from the Trump administration. The shirts had been promoting for $120, all of it going to mutual help and immigration causes, in keeping with Motta.

“We’re trying to highlight immigration and working families,” Motta stated. “Because I was seeing all of this scary imagery on social media, I realized we just lack so much community.”

Motta seen that members weren’t on their telephones once they got here to work together together with her tactile exhibition. “There is something really beautiful about this, coming together and seeing that there are real people behind the works that we’re making and also really having the conversations with the people here,” she mirrored.

Downstairs, Brooklyn-based photographer Martha Naranjo Sandoval, whose press Matarile Ediciones represents immigrant photographers, stood beneath a banner that learn “No human is illegal.” One small picture chronicled birds in Cuba, one other was a sensual documentation of hair, one sequence chronicled queer motherhood, and Naranjo Sandoval’s small, matchbox-sized e book featured the artist’s movie contact sheets.

“People tend to forget the humanity of immigrants,” Naranjo Sandoval stated, explaining the banner textual content, whose phrase can also be scrawled on Matarile Ediciones packaging.

Upstairs, the Egyptian, New York City-based photographer Anthony Hamboussi represented his press L Nour Editions, which he named after his daughter. In 2019, Hamboussi curated a present titled Our Land, reacting to the Brooklyn Museum’s controversial present This Place, which many criticized for “art washing” the Israeli occupation of the Palestine. He introduced alongside his personal pictures books, together with a group surveying NYC’s industrial waterways.

Hamboussi, whose grandfather was Palestinian, additionally introduced a e book, “Through Pictures and Posters 1967–1986” (2025), that includes a group of posters from Palestinian resistance teams. Recently, he stated, folks have approached him in sympathy about Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, however he emphasised that his poster sequence is supposed to attract consideration to the lengthy historical past of Israeli occupation.

Not far-off, photographer Elijah Gowin and his daughter manned the desk for Tin Roof Press, began by Gowin in 1998. He described picture presses as a approach to make pictures extra “democratic,” in distinction to gallery-priced works. Gowin’s press prints the work of Japanese-American photographer Osamu James Nakagawa, who sought in 2022 to {photograph} each Japanese incarceration camp established in 1942. This yr, Gowin printed the photographer’s work in newspaper tabloid format, promoting them for $20 every.

“This project is about news and current events,” Gowin stated. “When I saw on the news the dialogue about who is a real American, I said, ‘This is a great time for this project to be brought into a tabloid format.’”