What a BookJockey session is

BookJockey is a new and experimental format to show and enjoy photobooks. A BookJockey session is like a DJ session, but with photobooks, showing and mixing books creating a ‘story’ and inviting the audience to enjoy and feel them. To be a BJ you don’t need to be a photobook expert, you only need a passion for photobooks. In a BJ session the audience is invited to participate freely under the rules of the BJ.

BookJockey began as an experiment to try and test a new and daring format which poses a challenge for the BJ and for the audience, using BlankPaper School’s library.

It was born within the PlayBlankPaper group, a group created and managed indenpendently by students, alumni and supporters of BlankPaper School in Madrid, who joined together to propose and develop a different relationship with and to photography and the group itself from a common experience of the school.

We held eight BJ sessions since november 2012, inviting both teachers and guests, like Antonio Xoubanova, teacher in BlankPaper and member of the collective, Fosi Vegue, director of the school, Ricardo Garrido, guest photographer, specialist in japanese photography and photobooks, Federico Clavarino, teacher in the school, Juan Cires, guest photobook specialist, developing cuatrocuerpos.com site, Horacio Fernández, internationally renowned historian author of the recent book ‘The Latin American Photobook’, and Julián Barón, director of BlankPaper School in Valencia.

BookJockey is an open format, it has no definitive structure, every BJ is free to imagine and to put into action his/her own idea of a ‘BJ session’, as it has been happening in these first eight sessions. We encourage anyone, photographer or not, who wants to participate as a BJ or as organizer, to feel free to use this format and send us his/her proposal so we can spread the word from this blog.

In this blog we will announce new sessions as they are organized.