“Phoenicia: Irrational Catalogue”, has been selected as a recipient of an honorable mention in the Photobook Award EI2022.
Showed in the form of a catalogue raisonné, this book is a trip to an imaginary country within the borders of Lebanon, where the Alfonso Moral lived and worked for many years.
“The link I have been forging with Lebanon is ages old. This book is about this relationship transmuted here into an invented and imaginary territory named Phoenicia. My little Phoenicia is built on an amalgam of clichés and personal experiences. Together they form a biased and romantic view. This irrational catalog attempts to connect my experiences with those I would have liked to live. At a distance, some of my memories blend confusingly with others that were never of reality”.
"Zero" is among the selected books for the Author's Book Award 2020 in Les Rencontres de Arles we have still some copies!!
ZERO" by Alfonso Moral Rodriguez among the photo books selected by Brad Feuerhelm for American Suburb X.
Brad Feuerhelm REVIEW:
“Alfonso Moral. Zero. ANTI-books. An unbelievably intelligent book of contact sheets that the artist made while visiting Syria, Beirut and Libya. The book itself reads like a ring binder of negatives in which the supporting contact sheets reveal ghostly traces of war and destruction, absence and presence which dialogue with the physicality of the object asking the viewer to contemplate the 1 to 1 ration of negative to contact sheet and the implicit behaviour of audience relation to it. Many are blank having been under exposed and many are over-exposed leading to the ghosting of figures and ruins within. This reminds one at times of Broomberg & Chanarin’s The Day Nobody Died in which the photographic paper stock itself and its ephemeral traits ask us to consider what it is to “charge” physical photographic materials by including their presence of their processing by material means at the site or scene of trauma or event. It is an astounding body of work and dedicated to the late Hannes Wanderer of Peperoni Books.”
