De Natura Libris

By Álvaro Alejandro López

Enjoy De Natura Libris, a black and white photography exhibit by Álvaro Alejandro López that portrays the physical and abstract interactions with books through structures, textures, forms, and signs of use. The series navigates the viewer into interpreting the photographs based on their own personal connections from reading and using books. For more information, please contact the library at 305-553-1134 or gonzalezja@mdpls.org. All ages.

About the Exhibition

Revel on the bold photographic series titled De Natura Libris as it portrays our interactions with books – both physical and abstract. The corporeality of a book is captured through its structures, textures, forms and signs of use. Experiences brought on from reading and touching a book are ultimately individual, evoked by various attributes, such as the contents of a book, its textures and smells, the memories it awakens or simply the aesthetic beauty of its parts. By reading and using books, people create connections. Each journey through a book is personal, as are the interpretation of these photographs.

As writer and historian Roger Chartier describes De Natura Libris conjures several philosophical questions, like “What is a book?” from German philosopher Immanuel Kant. His answer distinguishes between the book as a material object, an "opus mechanicum" which belongs to whoever bought it and the book as a discourse addressed to the public, whose owner is the author. French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre pondered on “What is an author?” and “What is literature?” Both these questions were answered by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who stated, “A book is more than a verbal structure or a series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue that establishes with its reader and the intonation that it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory.”

In the 17th century, metaphorical language often allowed individuals to think about the double nature of books. Thus in 1680, a Madrid printer, Alonso Víctor de Paredes, inverted the classic metaphor that described human bodies and faces as books. He considered that books, a human creation like man, have a body and soul.

Through De Natura Libris viewers are led to hope that books will not disappear. This “cube of paper with leaves” as Borges described, is still the object most appropriate to the habits and expectations of readers who engage in an intense and profound dialogue with the works that make them think or dream.

Álvaro Alejandro López is a photographer from Mexico City. Having worked in the publishing industry for many years, Lopez recently began exhibiting his personal photography projects. He has exhibited in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Iceland, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Lopez was also selected as one of the winners of the Arte en la Red by Casa de América representing Madrid.

Lopez’s contact with and learning about photography started early. His great-uncle had books, prints, documents, letters and photo negatives of different authors, artists and photographers with whom he directly worked with as a museographer, such as Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

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