Summer's Almost Gone

In the last decade, Alex Llovet’s work has been structured around two major thematic axes: identity and memory. Exploring the photobook as a format to conceptualize and present his projects focused more and more on his immediate environment -the couple, the children and the territory he inhabits-, he has managed to generate his own universe where the photographic document and the poetic image intertwine and constantly question each other.

Is it possible to long for something that is still happening? This is the starting point of Summer’s Almost Gone, a hundred images taken during the summers of 2016 to 2021 in different places in England and Spain, which make up his particular family album of summer vacations. In these periods of contact with nature, synonymous with freedom, discovery and play, but also of challenges, growth and confrontation with one’s own ghosts, Llovet appeals to the transience of life while questioning the limitations of photographic practice in the face of the frustration of not being able to be both actor and spectator at the same time.

If memory builds the autobiographical story from unconnected fragments, filling the gaps with our imagination, the edition of this work, more sensorial than reasoned, does the same through 24 sequences structured in the form of quadriptychs of images that behave like vertical frames of a fake documentary, the life of the author. After six years of work and five different models, this book is the formal culmination of a poetic and conceptual research where the page layout evokes the functioning of memory itself: veiled images, moments that we barely remember, pages that the reader must unfold to peek into the windows of the past.

Accompanying the images, the poetic prose of the writer Lara Moreno puts herself in the photographer’s shoes to weave a subtle parallel narration from the vestiges of those summers.