Selected photobooks from Imprint: Contemporary Latin American Photobooks, 2026. Courtesy of CONTACT Photography Festival and Punto de Fuga Bogotá.

Imprint: Contemporary Latin American Photobooks

April 16 – June 6, 2026
Reception: Thursday, April 23, 6 – 9pm
Curator Tours: Saturday, April 25, 1pm (Spanish) and 2pm (English)
Sur Gallery, Toronto

Core Exhibition of the 2026 CONTACT Photography Festival

Presented by Punto De Fuga Bogotá—an experimental platform dedicated to the critical exploration and exhibition of Latin American photobooks—Imprint features a selection of 50 recent and rare titles from 10 countries. In Latin America, the photobook has emerged as a fertile site of cultural resistance and aesthetic exploration in the face of structural precarity. Far from being merely a publishing format, it functions as a critical tool for self-affirmation, transforming limited resources into a space for material and symbolic experimentation.

The books brought together in this exhibition revolve around the notion of the “imprint” (imprenta) as a shared concern within contemporary Latin American photobook practices. Archive and memory appear as persistent traces that resist erasure; identity is shaped through everyday experience, displacement, and lived time; territory emerges as both a physical and affective space marked by intimacy, conflict, and belonging. Mourning, migration, and daily life surface as recurring themes through which the photobook registers gestures, absences, and fragments of collective history. Through the printed image, silence becomes material, absence acquires form, and the photobook operates as a site where the idiosyncrasies of place leave visible marks that resonate across the continent.

One of the defining qualities of the Latin American photobook is its commitment to materiality as intrinsic to narrative, despite the ongoing scarcity of resources and printing techniques available across the region. These limitations do not diminish the work; rather, they intensify it. Paper, sequencing, rhythm, folds, binding, and printing processes become carriers of meaning rather than ornamental decisions, reinforcing the photobook as a tactile and temporal experience shaped by context.

Operating between art and archive, engagement and contemplation, the photobook invites the reader to engage with images through the body, as much as through the gaze. Imprint proposes an encounter with these printed traces as affective cartographies, where the editorial gesture becomes both a form of resistance and a way of imagining beauty through shared experience.

Featuring books by: Camilo Amaya, Melba Arellano, Esteban Ferro Astaiza, Felipe Romero Beltrán, Ros Boisier, Pablo Cabado, Alejandro Cartagena, Rodrigo Claramonte, Luis Corzo, Nía Diedla, Sergio Dominguez, Juanita Escobar, Federico Estol, Stephen Ferry, Mateo Gómez Garcia, Christo Geoghegan, Tom Griggs, Diana Guerra, Pablo Hare, Emiliano Zúñiga Hernández, Malas Hierbas, Michael José, Enea Lebrun, Enrique Metinides, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Luis Mora, Alejandro Morales, Nicolai Olaf, Cristóbal Olivares, Cristian Ordoñez, Juan Orrantia, Federico Paladino, André Penteado, Mateo Pérez, Ronald Pizzoferrato, Marco Antônio Pomarico, Tommaso Protti, Solange Quiroga, Rosângela Rennó, Sofia Reyes & Andrea Triana, Ana Núñez Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Guadalupe Ruiz, Henry Salazar, Flavia Schuster, Alec Soth, Arturo Soto, Lesie Spak, Susana Vargas, Cristina Velásquez, and Marcos Zegers

Curated by Laura Carbonell. Presented by CONTACT and Punto de Fugo Bogotá in partnership with Sur Gallery.

Laura Carbonell is an independent curator and the founder of Punto de Fuga Bogotá. In 2022, Carbonell designed and developed Universo Fotolibro in Madrid, the first iteration of this exhibition of Latin American photography books. The exhibition was also presented in 2024 at Fotofestiwal, Poland and the Artphilein bookstore and gallery, Switzerland. Carbonell has also designed workshops and given courses on documentary practices at the Javeriana, de los Andes, del Bosque and Jorge Tadeo Lozano universities in Bogotá.

Sur Gallery is Toronto’s first gallery space dedicated to the exhibition and critical engagement of contemporary Latin American and Latinx art and is a project of the non-profit arts organization LACAP (Latin American Canadian Art Projects).

CONTACT Photography Festival is a Toronto-based charitable organization dedicated to exhibiting, analyzing, and celebrating photography and lens-based media through an annual festival that takes place every May. info@contactphoto.com / contactphoto.com / @contactphoto

For information contact:

Sur Gallery
39 Queens Quay East, Suite 100
Toronto, ON M5E OA5
416-654-7787
info@surgallery.ca
www.surgalleryvirtual.ca
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Wednesday to Friday: Noon – 6pm
Saturday: 11pm – 5pm