Réplica Ediciónes at the ICP: A conversation with Arturo Salazar and José Ruiz of Ediciónes Réplica (whose answers are combined).

Interview by James Maher
ICP Photobook Fest 2026: May 8 (Fri) to 10 (Sun)

-Can you give us an introduction to the ICP’s Book on a Wall exhibit — Fuego Camina Conmigo?

Fuego Camina Conmigo is a project we made with La Burra Riso, who is a Riso printing press in Medellín. It's a co-edition we made with them from an archive they found, like, five years ago — from original printings of lobby cards. These are the cards that were exhibited outside theaters to promote movies. They are all original printings, and we made 300 copies of the book. What you see on the wall is a translation of that material — the material we had left behind from the 300 copies.

-How did the archive come onto your radar?

We used to work a lot with them. We are friends, and they are always inviting us to make projects with them. A friend of theirs had this archive and didn't know what to do with it, so they traded that archive for a bicycle and stored it for five years. Then they asked us if we wanted to make something with it with them.
And immediately we hear that this material shouldn't exist because after a movie theater received the distribution materials for a film, they were commanded to destroy everything after the projection of the movies. The easy way was to set it on fire, because the materials are flammable. So we thought the best idea was to think about how we can represent fire in the printing — in the back of the original prints. It’s a publication about the different ways fire enters cinema, and the relation between fire and motion images. We sat with all these, like, 10,000 copies of original prints and started selecting them — discarding the damaged ones, to start looking for the covers of the books, creating relationships between the images. Then the printing with them, then the final binding of the book. That was the whole process.

-Did you burn something as part of the project?

Yes. At the launch of the book in Medellín — that was one year ago, April 2025 — we made this exhibition launch in Medellín and we burned many of the copies we had left behind from the copies of the book.
The actual exhibition had five components. There are Riso prints we made with La Burra Riso — small stills from a movie called The Written that we love. We think it represents the idea of burning cinema. We have copies of the lobby cards. We have posters from the movie. We have a video — a kind of collage of different movies we love, we think they represent the idea of fire in cinema. The four of us selected among like ten movies and we cropped different parts of the movie where there is fire, and made a whole video that is going to be projected on the wall. And on the wall there is also the book, Fuego Camina Conmigo.
But when we were asked to bring the project here to ICP, we wanted it to be translated. The book is the lobby cards, but at the end you found a text in Spanish about the relation of these images and the burning, etc. We didn't want it to be easy, to just print the text and insert it, so we decided to make a new edition in the shape of a set of matches. So you will find the book, and next to it, a matchbook — the text translated to English and a square crop of an original lobby card.

-What years were the movies from? Were they Spanish films or worldwide?

Worldwide, all kinds. The lobby cards are from the '60s, '70s, and '80s — drama, romance, horror, comedy, porn movies, all kinds of genres. And the stills we printed on the back, the ones with the flames, are from the 1920s to today.

-Tell us about Réplica Ediciónes — how it started, what it is.

The name of the project is Ediciónes Réplica. We think of it as an investigation project before it is an editorial project, because the investigations we make sometimes transform into books and sometimes into exhibitions. It began like six years ago, between an interest we had in books and an interest in photography — and the perfect combination of both is the photobook. We have published around 25 titles. I think seven have had an exhibition as well.
Our very first book and exhibition was actually related to New York. In 2021 we were looking for books on the streets in Bogotá and we found an original catalog of the Family of Man exhibition that was made at MoMA in 1955. We were intrigued by the two photos taken in Colombia that were included in the exhibition, and we started looking for those photos and the photographers who took them.

And we found a document in MoMA's archive that says the exhibition, they made four copies to travel the world, and the fourth copy traveled to Latin America to support right-hand, military governments at that time. Colombia was included in the exhibition display — Cuba, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay. And we asked ourselves: why is there no record in Colombian photographic history that the exhibition came? Because Family of Man is one of the most important photographic exhibitions of the last century. Why is no one talking about this?
Long story short — we found out the exhibition actually came to Colombia, but it arrived during a massive social strike to defeat our dictator, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. After that strike the country was in a very strange moment, and the exhibition came, but no one ever took it from the crates it was traveling in. It’s a funny story because we can say that the most important photographic exhibition of the 20th century went to Colombia, but no one saw it.
That became the foundation of a book called A Photograph Meant to Be: The Family of Man in Bogotá, and an exhibition we made thinking about how this exhibition could be done 60, 70 years later, but using the work of Latin American photographers.

-Even though the exhibition never opened, did the catalog find its way into Colombia? Was it still influential?

Yeah, of course. When we have worked with other photographers we always told them this story, they always say, "Yes, I went to New York in the seventies and bought the catalog," or "I asked a friend to bring back photos from the exhibition." Many Latin American photographers have this exhibition very clear in their minds because it's a way to relate to their own images — to think how these categories in the exhibition are useful for understanding their own work.

-How did you know, with that first project, that you wanted to keep doing this?

I don't think at that moment we had it clear, the direction the project was going to take. But we knew we wanted to look at archives and make things with them — exhibitions, performances, books. I think that first exhibition kind of made a path. We found many photographers who were influenced from the Family of Man system of photography, and it was interesting how in the following years they start appearing in the investigations we started making — in their own archives.

-How would you describe yourselves? You're a mixture of artists, investigators, historians, narrators?

We studied art back in Colombia, and we like to think of ourselves as a kind of detectives — printing material detectives. So we are collectors. We like to collect, collect, collect, all types of printed materials: posters, books, ephemera, postcards, newspapers, boxes, magazines, all kinds. And in that collecting, we always ask ourselves how this archive can be displayed in a way that not only shows the importance of it, but lets the user continue using the material. That's why we like, most of the times, to use original materials in the publications, in the exhibitions, and in the projects we make.

We like to think that the materials we collect are not just collection items for a museum or an institution. You can buy it, you can find it in a book, you can use it to reprint, and this is because as designers slash artists, we think that when you start working with a blank screen and designing a book or a poster, it's different from when you decide to design something that is going to be printed on something that has already been designed. We like to start conversations with the people who were involved in the production, in the design, in the printing of that thing. It is a recognition of their work.

Also — neither of us studied design. We just read books and, like, kind of learned to design by watching the books we like. In that way, when we make exhibitions, we like to think of the world as a canvas when we design a page. In one exhibition we have on display right now at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, we thought of the museum walls as the pages of the catalog of the exhibition. You can find letters and text definitions throughout the whole space.
We don't like to think that design is something apart from the investigation, apart from the bookmaking. We like to think they are all connected. The shape of the book, the weight, the smell — everything from the object has to respond to the investigation, to the content.

-You mentioned the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín — can you tell us about your work with the museums in Colombia and what else you have coming up?

At the moment we have the Open Signal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín. We also collaborate with a gallery in Bogotá called Espacio El Dorado, which has a strong focus on photography — after we return to Bogotá next week, we are going to install two exhibitions there.
And there is another project we made with the photographic archive of the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá — not Medellín. We were invited by Susana Vargas, who created an education project in museums, to do a residency focused on an editorial project. So we worked with the photographic archive and made a catalog that can also be displayed in space. We selected around 400 to 500 photographs from the archive that tell the whole story of the museum from the '60s to about 1992, 1993, in photographs.

After Bogotá, we have an exhibition in Buenos Aires at a library and gallery space called Atlas, run by Martín Polatti. It's a book that has the shape and the idea of a remote control — about how you can control images using one device. That's the main concept, and we are still working on it.

-You mentioned not studying design — what was the experience of actually figuring out how to print a photo book? How difficult was it?

We like to say that our books don't have a PDF. You couldn't find a virtual file version of any of our books — just in one case, but in most cases, no. Because we like to think a lot about the materiality of the book, in the way the book will develop over time.

For example, one book we made about three years ago, Notas de un Fotógrafo, was very funny because it has two binding systems. On one hand, you have the spiral, and on the other, the signatures — the sewn binding. As it has two different kinds of binding in the same book, when we designed it on screen, we had to design it upside down. We told the printer we needed to print an upside down book, and the printer was okay with that. And when they gave us the copies back, we told them we needed to cut it in half — because the book opens in the middle, not at the edge, because of the two binding systems.

We are always challenging the people who work with us — sending them upside down files, telling them to cut it in half, asking them to print in ways they haven't done before. And that's because, as you saw it, the designs respond to a very fine conceptualization process. We make some decisions that seem very simple but have all the meaning of the book.

-Can you tell us about three books you are most proud of?

The first is Unidad Mínima. We like to think about books as objects and how they can relate to an object we see every day. We were working with the archive of Óscar Monsalve, a photographer who specialized in documenting artworks and museums — he worked almost three decades for the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. We were going to his house every day for two years. Everyone knows Óscar Monsalve as the photographer for artworks, but that's only one part of his work. We started discovering this unpublished archive — performances, happenings, ephemeral actions made by artists in Colombia during the '80s. The part of his archive he never published.

We found this photographic recording of something in the '70s: he documented the making of a brick. And we thought — how do you translate four decades of work into a book? The brick responds to that. The book has the size and the color of a brick. It's like a whole index — you can read it page by page, or you can move through it in different ways and recognize the history of Colombian artists through a photographer's view.

The second is Impreso en Colombia — Printed in Colombia. It's a research we made over five years, looking for printed material with photographic content: newspapers, books, magazines, ephemera, all printed in Colombia. We don't like the category "photobook" to refer to all of that material — most of that material wasn't made for that purpose. So we analyzed how photography creates memories in people, and we developed a research of 452 publications made in Colombia during the 20th century, organized into five groups: political history, geography, the idea of progress and architecture, a review of how the history of photography in Colombia has been written, and finally the most radical experiments — artists and photographers in the '70s and '80s who later became the idea of the photobook.

A very important aspect is that each chapter starts with an original page — an original sheet from one of the books in that chapter. We found many original copies of the same books and took them to be cut and used the pages as chapter dividers. This was a very contested idea, because most of these researchers believe these books are just collector's items, just for people who can pay a lot of money. The idea of cutting the originals was a response to that.
The third is our most recent, published in December — Reportaje a una Reportera, which means interview with a female reporter, Alicia Chamorro. She is the pioneer of female photojournalists in Colombia, and she was completely unknown. When we were doing the investigation for Impreso en Colombia, we found a small book published in 1948 — one of the first books in Colombia with almost all photographic content. The copy we found had an envelope inside with original prints from the book. On the back of each print was a stamp: Alicia Chamorro, Reportera Gráfica. And we asked ourselves: who is this woman, and why do we not know her at all?

We tracked down her son, who lives in Paris, and he didn't have anything from her archive — but he recommended we contact her sister, who lives in Bogotá. She is 93 years old. We came to her apartment, and to our surprise she had spent her whole life keeping six family albums with much of the work Alicia made in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. We think this book is part of the way for her to become known, to put her in the history books. Between the dogs and the mountain landscapes there were five presidents, people who went to fight in Korea in the '50s, the elections, earthquakes, floods, different personalities from other countries. She traveled a lot through south of Colombia and north of Ecuador and she made these amazing photographs.

The story is amazing but also very sad because she died at 33 years old — the theory we have is that she was very experimental, and she started working with color photography and 3D photography, a process that was very toxic. She developed lupus and died in 1957. But in her short life she made this amazing work, and we think this will be our most important book — because it is such an honor to put someone's name in history.

-Before Réplica, there was a project around Gráficas Molinari. Can you tell us about that?

Before Réplica, I started research about a printing company established in Cali in the '50s called Gráficas Molinari. They specialized in producing popular images — very cheap, for everyone: Animals, religious images, landscapes, all kinds of images that you could put on the wall in your house or carry in your wallet. Colombia is a very religious country, so all the saints, all kinds of imagery.

I started this research because I was working with artists from the '60s, '70s, and '80s who used these images in their work — cutting them, or painting them, using them on movies, or photographing them. Everyone knew these images came from Cali, but no one knew who made them. I was very intrigued: who was the responsible person behind all of this?

I went to Cali and asked and asked and asked. And I found a storage space with the leftovers of Gráficas Molinari — a company established in 1952 by Antonio Molinari, a Spanish guy who came to Colombia because of the war. He printed for the whole continent: Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Mexico. I think all Latin Americans are related to this kind of imaginary because it's so kitsch, so popular, so pop, so strange, so colorful. We all have a grandmother or an aunt, someone who had those images on their wall.

After I found the storage and could access the material, the person who had it told me he wanted to burn it because he didn't know what to do with it. So I collected everything, brought it to Bogotá, and started this project — using the original prints to create other publications, books, exhibitions, performances, to put them back into use.

-Are you obsessive people? Are you very detail-oriented?

We are so obsessive. As we said — we like to collect a lot of material. We are very intricate about every small printed thing. We are very obsessive in all of the process: the collecting, in the design, the distribution, the way the books start to circulate. We are very very obsessive and crazy people.
And we like to walk a lot. Our joke is that we are always walking any city carrying things we found. It's a very obsessive way to live.

-Do you have a storage unit somewhere, just for all of this?

Yes, but it's very interesting because we collect many, many, many things, but as we collect, we redistribute. We collect in order to distribute. That's how the circle keeps going. And you can see it in many of our books — we use the collected material inside the books themselves, original sheets, so that the people who buy them also have the experience of touching the material the way we do every day.

-Are any of your books for sale at the book fair?

Yes, we brought eight bags full of books for the Photobook Fest. Some are sold out — the Family of Man book is sold out and we are working on a second edition. But the others are here. And actually the most recent project is not Reportaje a una Reportera — it's a small book we brought specifically for the fair called The First Collection. It began when we showed Unidad Mínima to a friend, and he received it and said, "The thing the brick is missing is the concrete — the paste between the bricks." We thought about that for two years, and said we needed a concrete book. It's a collection of happenings and performances, each a series of six or seven photos that spread in three meters. The paper, the material — everything relates to concrete. You can find that book at the Photobook Fest this week.

Replica Ediciones: @ediciones.replica

The founders
José Ruiz: @se_hacen_publicaciones/
Arturo Salazar: @arturosalazarg/

ICP: @icp

DP: @jamesmaherphoto @session_press