15.45-16.25 Grab a drink and join the fun – fifteen years of partying & publishing!

Being passionate about something is fun, being passionate about something in a group is even more fun. Blackbook Publications is a publishing house run collectively by a group of photographers/artists for 15 years. They work with book publishing, exhibitions and photography in the broadest sense. Through primarily pictures and films, two of the people who run the publishing house talk about all the fun and mess that goes into this type of business.

Blackbook Publications is a publisher and an artist collective, established in Gothenburg in 2009. Since the start, they have published books and other printed material by interesting artists from the Scandinavian scene of contemporary photography. Blackbook Publications has published about 30 books of widely varying nature. Their idea is to publish books that are not just a printed version of a work, but a work of its own in itself. Blackbook Publications members have received many fine awards and shown their work at major institutions around Sweden and the world.  

Lotta Törnroth (b. 1981 in Solna) works with photography, text, sculpture and aquarelle. She is educated at the University of Photography in Gothenburg and at Aalto University, the University of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. Törnroth has published two monographs with the publisher Blackbook Publications, and participated in exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In 2023, she spent 6 months at IASPIS in Stockholm, where she worked on two photo books, among other things.

Rikard Laving, born in 1978, works across genres with everything from documentary projects to artistic exploration of materials and techniques. Regularly publishes photographic books/publications and is a trained teacher at Konstfack. Represented since 2016 by French gallery VU’.