Gazebook's Celebration of the Photobook

© Clementine Schneidermann, from the series The unbearable, the sadness and the rest

Gazebook is a fresh and ambitious idea launched by the three young Italian photographers Teresa Bellina, Melissa Carnemolla, and Simone Sapienza. The festival will be held in Punta Secca, a small town in South East Sicily, where several renowned figures from the photography industry will come together to discuss, review, and show photobooks.

It won't be difficult to meet them, since the festival has been designed to facilitate meetings, networking and exchange of opinions. The bookshop and the festival exhibitions will indeed be accompanied by nice initiatives as the Speakers' Corner Market and Gazebos - places where authors and publishers will display, promote, and sell their photobooks - and the Lemonade Stand where guests like Martin Parr and Colin Pantall will serve you a lemonade and talk with you about photography.

From the project Blade Diary by Piero Firrincieli

The festival will showcase nine exhibitions. Among them Olivia Arthur will present her project Stranger, in which she shows us the radical changes that have happened in Dubai through the journey of an imaginary survivor of a boat accident in 1961, who returns there fifty years later; Clementine Schneidermann, the winner of the PHM 2015 Grant New Generation prize will present her new project The unbearable, the sadness and the rest, commissioned by Arts+Minds in Blaenau Gwent, Wales 2015-2016; Eileen Quinn and Valentino Bellini's Limbo, a series about the experiences of people who became victim of migrant smuggling in North Africa; Pierre Liebaert will exhibit Free Now, an intimate project about voyeurism and the search for freedom in the social network era; and A First/Dummy Book exhibition curated by Photobook Bristol and IC Visual Lab.

© Pierre Liebaert, from the series Free Now, winner of the PHM 2016 Grant New Generation Prize

Among the talks, lectures and presentations, don't miss Slideluck Gazebook, a projection of 20 multimedia projects related to photobooks. The event will be on Saturday September 10 and is organized under the artistic direction of Valentina Abenavoli (Publisher, Co-Founder AKINA Books), Andy Adams (Founder Flak Photo), Daria Birang (Artist, Curator and Photo Editor) and Yumi Goto (Curator of Reminders Photography Stronghold).

The festival will start on September 9, so you are still in time to organize a beautiful weekend in Sicily. As the founders say "between photobooks and drinks, gazebos and Panama hats, we are looking forward to seeing you!"

To learn more about Gazebook, please visit gazebook.it.