This year, come to the library!

"Architectural Photography: an illustrated literature", and "What is a book of photography?" are the conferences that will be given at Tarragona Public Library by Lluís Casals, architectural photographer, and Antonio Ansón, essayist and professor at Zaragoza University.

Public libraries are wide, diverse, free spaces, imbued with knowledge and learning. Many of their users have restless, enquiring minds, and are not necessarily experts on culture or professional artists. For this reason, the opportunity of presenting two of the SCAN conferences in the public library, a different domain to the normal, was not to be missed.

Saturday, 9 May, at 12 h, Lluís Casals will speak about "Documentarism and creativity from the edition, the publication and the archive", about the representation of space and the technical and conceptual resources which can be used in order to reach the reader with maximum impact.

Specialising in architectural photography and interiors, Lluís Casals has worked on documenting projects and various architectural studies in Spain, and has a personal archive of more than 20.000 images of Spanish and international architecture. He has shown his work in different individual exhibitions and collectives. He has collaborated on numerous national and international publications. Since 1977, he has been a speaker at seminars and conferences, and has given courses on photography. He is also currently professor on the Masters in Photography at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Antonio Ansón, professor at Zaragoza Universirty and essayist in literature, cinema and art, will on Thursday 14 May speak at the conference "What is a book of photography?" In this session, Ansón will talk about which elements are involved when putting together a book of photography. We do not only need to consider the images, but also the design, format, texts and printing. This session will allow us to analyse exactly what constitutes a book of photography, a space exclusively dedicated to images, and what are the characteristics and purposes that differentiate it from an exhibition or a catalogue.

Antonio Ansón is the author of essays such as  The isthmus of lights (1994), Novels as albums (2000) or The bootcleaner of Daguerre (2007),  and has edited the monographs Photo and poetry (2002), One thousand stories of the image and one more (2004) and  What to photograph for (2006).  He has been director of courses on photography at the Menéndez Pelayo International University and, together with Ferdinando Scianna, of the next Encuentros de Photoespaña, Words and photos. He is director of the collection of photography books Cuarto Oscuro. Amongst his most recent books is the novel Knocking on heaven's door  (Artemisa, 2007) and the French-Spanish bilingual edition of Pantys mortels (Le Grand Os, 2008) and the narrative The Art of Flight (Eclipsados, 2009).