These are the selected artists, authors, and publishers from our open call WOPHA at Tropic Bound Book Fair.

WOPHA / 02.27.2023

We are pleased to announce the selected artists, authors, and publishers from our open call to participate in the inaugural edition of Tropic Bound —South Florida’s first international biennial artists’ book fair. Tropic Bound was founded in 2020 by Cristina Favretto, Sarah Michelle Rupert, and Ingrid Schindall as a way to bring attention and focus to artists’ books. Its mission is to promote and support the work of book artists while providing opportunities for dialogue and a platform for national and international artists and publishers to exhibit, sell and exchange artists’ books.

Selected through an open call, WOPHA will feature more than 20 photobooks published by women and non-binary photographers, collectives, and sister organizations from around the world. 

Tickets available at tropicboundfair.org and tropicboundfair.eventbrite.com

The fair takes place from Friday to Sunday, February 17-19, 2023.

Featured Publications

The Fruitless Garden by Adriana Estivill
Adriana Estivill is a Miami-based visual artist born in Manchester and raised in Mexico City. Her work gravitates towards the exploration of vulnerability and the human psyche. Her book “The Fruitless Garden” questions the meaning of “fruit” and the subjectivity of its absence by appropriating texts written by women who did not have biological children and through the symbol of nature in its eternal fecundity.  

Ovni Archive / Batería de Cenizas / La Disuasión. La Marea y el Límite by Rosell Meseguer
Rosell Meseguer is a visual artist and professor based in Madrid. Her publications belong to a collection she started in 2012 titled “Atlas Ovni Archive,” which focused on the Cold War, the world of espionage, and the secret service. The archive consists of a collection assembled by the artist of photographs, newspaper cuttings, books, and similar materials that lead like clues into an unfathomable world of political thought.

Guarded by Taylor Yocom
Taylor Yocom holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. From 2014 – 2017, she photographed women and femme-identifying people on college campuses across the United States holding what they use to protect themselves from sexual assault on walks at night. From pepper spray and rape whistles to keys and umbrellas, these objects shed light on the gendered conditioning to be “on guard” in response to sexual assault and harassment in everyday life. 

Frozen Waves by Dina Oganova (Dikarka)
Dina Oganova – aka DIKARKA – is a documentary photographer based in Tbilisi, Georgia, working on personal, long-term projects. “Frozen Waves” is about kidnapped young girls in Georgia for marriage – an old “tradition” covered as beautiful by men. While the practice has garnered heavy scrutiny for human rights violations, it continues in many rural areas.

Point A to Point B: Analog Explorations by Dale Rio
Point A to Point B: analog explorations is a bi-annual print publication launched in June 2021 by photographer, curator, and writer Dale Rio. Her goal with the journal is to celebrate the artists who utilize traditional photographic practices – often in new and exciting ways – to tell stories of travel and place through a wide variety of processes and artistic styles, providing a confluence of experimentation and creative visual storytelling.

Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear by Maria Kapajeva
Maria Kapajeva is an artist who works between Estonia and the UK. Her book “Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear” explores the relationships between collective and personal memories by looking at the community surrounding a textile mill, now closed, of which her family was a part. The story of one small community is set in the larger context of post-industrial cities worldwide as they seek new identities. Kapajeva focuses on women, with a heightened sensitivity towards social and political matters in post-Soviet culture.

A Study of Dust by Gabriela Gamboa
Gabriela Gamboa is a Venezuelan-American artist whose work connects her personal history with displacement, transplantation, exile, and memory issues. A Study of Dust began when the inevitability of her departure from Venezuela became tangible. After years of active protests and political struggle, she slowly started her farewell: a sense of unbelonging in her own country. The book centers around the body and space relationship we developed in our homes and countries as it shifted from sanctuary [home] to cell [lockdown].  

Mythologies of Return: Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures by Aurora De Armendi with essay contribution by Adriana Méndez Rodenas
Aurora De Armendi was born and raised in Cuba. Her work explores the poetics of place and displacement, and the individual and collective memories therein, through a balance of scholarly and material research. “Mythologies of Return: Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures” is a limited edition artist’s book honoring Ana Mendieta’s “Rupestrian Sculptures” at Las Escaleras de Jaruco (Havana) and her original proposal of making an artist’s book of this series. With the project concept, copperplate photogravure images, printing, and binding by Aurora De Armendi, the book includes an interdisciplinary scholarly essay entitled “Mythologies of Return: The Taíno Route in Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures” by Adriana Méndez Rodenas. 

Perfect Pearl by Tara Fallaux
Tara Fallaux is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. She mainly works on long-term investigative and narrative projects involving photography, film, and sound. “Perfect Pearl” focuses on the concept of love seen from a female perspective. It contrasts the different layers of online and offline, the inner and outer world, and dream versus reality through a unique folding technique. The intimate inner world is hidden behind the fold of the book. The photos are accompanied by personal, intimate WeChat moments made anonymously. The foreword was written by the Chinese curator Yining He. 

Melody of Light by Keiko Nomura
Keiko Nomura [JP] studied photography in Osaka and Los Angeles. “Melody of Light” is a result of the artist’s six-week residency in Wrocław – her moving freely among various places and people, themes, and contexts. She juxtaposes and mixes photos from Tokyo and Wrocław. The element that connects photographs is light. The light makes landscapes and portraits peculiarly unreal, and the spaces of both cities seem to merge into one patchwork metropolis. The photos are accompanied by a short poetic essay written by the artist. 

YAGA by Agata Kalinowska
Agata Kalinowska [PL] is a Polish photographer whose work documents the precariat’s experiences. “Yaga” constitutes an archetype of a contemporary witch, but above all, it is an emancipatory idea of socially excluded women. Kalinowska’s first publication is a book about freedom – about non-heteronormative standards of attractiveness, age shaming, and deconstructing the male-female myths that shape the system. It is also a work about the relationship between beauty and socially imposed female identity. It is about the liberating power of a conscious choice to be excluded, to function outside the confines of norms and the established cultural context – about the isolation that allows one to exist on one’s own terms. 

Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road by Monika Orpik
Monika Orpik (b.1997) is a visual artist from Poland based in Hamburg. “Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road” looks at the moment of change when the most idyllic scenario becomes a horror of a political regime, from picking apples in the orchard to tear gas on the street. The book combines photographic material and texts that revolve around the permanent in-between state that is inseparable from the notion of migration. What happens when you’re forced to leave something behind and start anew elsewhere? What tools do you use to visualize the loss and the absence? How do you build your identity when the dialect you speak is rejected as a language? 

Halo Tango by Diane Bielik
Diane Bielik is a London-based artist and photographer. Her book “Halo Tango” is a fictional narrative told from a single found object -a small framed charcoal portrait of a woman ‘Mrs. Eyles’ made by another woman Betty Steer in 1962. Part still life, part landscape, and part found imagery, this series of photographs evolved to form a cryptic story set within a claustrophobic domestic stage. In the book, an accompanying text imagines the act of these two women coming together, one to draw the other to sit. It contemplates ideas of unity, solidarity, sisterhood, and quieter (or unsung) forms of feminist action or resistance.

Fixation by Joanna Pawlowska
Joanna Pawłowska is an artist based in Cracow. Her book “Fixation” contains photos from 2013 – 2018 focused on marginal places. These are seemingly dead places, out-of-sets, margins of reality that emanate meaning and life when we look at them. What is a picture when we reduce it to a minimal form? What associations does it evoke? What messages does it convey? How is the viewer reflected in the image, and how does this image resonate with the next viewer? Can a personal experience revealed in concise pictures be universal, understandable, and intimate?  

朧月 a resplendent afterimage by Angelica Ong
Angelica Ong is a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).”朧月 a resplendent afterimage” invites viewers to wander, examine, and discover a resplendent beauty in the minutiae of the world. The artist photographed the prints of her images, retaining every scuff mark and blemish accumulated on their surfaces, and then used these new photographs in her book to give them a sense of objecthood. The photos and words float in space, echoing the rhythm and pace that the artist took as she wandered in the world to capture these photographs. 

Something Dark by Sabrina Peters
Sabrina Peters is a German photographer and video performer living in Herne. “Something Dark” reflects the scientific exploration of the unknown in analogy to the world of travel. Peters traveled from South to North of Chile trying to catch the unique atmosphere of the Atacama Desert, host to the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. The book shows a combination of her exploration during her travel to Chile and extracts from later virtual visits to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) website, when visiting the ESO sites in person wasn’t possible due to the pandemic.

Mirada Inversa by Elizabeth Schummer and Daniela Díaz Larralde
Mirada Inversa arises from a correspondence between images by Elizabeth Schummer and texts by Daniela Díaz Larralde. The book approaches nature through the textures in rocks, trunks, sand, earth, and all organic elements that refer to the origins and the primitive. The permanence of the trace in these substrates opens a world to the imagination and reinterpretation of our senses, while slow observation allows us to give new meaning to what we see.

Food Cart Fantasy by Melissa Eder
Melissa Eder is a New York-based visual artist. Her book “Food Cart Fantasy” presents documentary photographs of these ubiquitous food trucks from the last 15 years. Eder focuses on the structure of the cart itself, their LED positive messages, the food, and the wonderful people who work tirelessly (and in every type of weather) to feed New Yorkers. Even though they are mobile, she loves how these carts are integrated into the city’s landscape, representing its diverse cultural identity. 

El Negro Detrás de la Oreja by Patricia Encarnacion
Patricia Encarnación is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work dissects, understands, and constantly challenges identity through “Caribbeaness.” El Negro Detrás de la Oreja (The Black Behind the Ear) is an old Dominican idiom first used in the 1883 poem by Juan Antonio Alix. The poem criticizes racial prejudice when Dominicans prioritize their European or white heritage while simultaneously rejecting their African roots. In the book, Encarnación creates compositions with minimalist aesthetics interpreting popular Dominican phrases to depict “Dominicanidad” in a decolonial context.  

The Pulse of Nature: Spirituality in the Florida Swamps by Lisette Morales McCabe
Lisette Morales McCabe is a multicultural Nicaraguan-born photographer. Her work focuses on identity, gender, ecology, and food heritage. Lisette seeks to generate visual narratives for healing and dislodging stereotypes. “The Pulse of Nature” contains 29 images, created over five years, of places in nature that inspire connectivity with the environment. The book is an invitation to learn about the beauty of Florida’s unique ecosystem, including ancestral territories, open ranches near Okeechobee, and sanctuaries.

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation. Another Way of Knowing by Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago
“Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation” questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities.

San Francisco 70s: Urban Portraits by Carlotta Boettcher
Carlotta Boettcher is a Cuban-born documentary photographer. Her photobook “San Francisco 70s: Urban Portraits” presents the movement of seekers, artists, eccentrics, gays, liberated and creative folks who flocked to the city in search of adventure, personal freedom, and destiny during the seventies. The images capture the zeitgeist of the universal effort of individuals to extricate from the oppressive conformity of their times and their species. 

Becoming Sisters: Women Photography Collectives & Organizations by Aldeide Delgado
“Becoming Sisters: Women Photography Collectives & Organizations” is an impactful 286-page photobook by editors Aldeide Delgado and Ana Clara Silva that centers around collaborative practices in photography from a feminist perspective. Presented alongside the 2021 WOPHA Congress in Miami, this publication works as a registry and collective manifesto of 40 international women and non-binary collectives and like-minded organizations and 98 women-identified and non-binary photographers reframing the dominant narratives of photography history.