Bravo
Felipe Romero Beltrán
Loose Joints
Spanish
Texts by Victoria del Val, Dominick Bermúdez, Alejandra Aragon, Albert Corbí
Hardcover
168 pages
240 × 295 mm
2025
ISBN 9781912719464
Identity and geography intersect in Romero Beltrán’s conceptual poetics of suspended time and human resilience on the US-Mexico border. Bravo situates itself in the liminal space of the Rio Bravo, a site of perpetual tension and migration where identity and geography intersect. Focusing on a 270-kilometre stretch of the river, Romero Beltrán’s Bravo constructs an elusive visual narrative where the river itself becomes a silent protagonist, shaping the lives of those who approach it but rarely appearing in the frame. Through stark portraits, austere interiors, and scarred landscapes, Bravo captures the suspended time of migration as his subjects wait, sometimes for years, in the shadow of an uncertain crossing.
Romero Beltrán’s signature style is precise in the pursuit of a political reality, where meticulously produced portraiture both reveals and conceals the resilience, exhaustion and hope of the migrant experience, alongside the muted delicacy of Romero Beltrán’s interiors, where a speaker, a mattress, a red-painted table become loaded with symbolic weight. Divided into three chapters—Endings, Bodies, and Breaches—Romero Beltrán’s inscrutable documentary approach challenges the semiotics of classification, enclosure, definition, and identification in his visual aesthetics that mirror the suppressed and controlled notions of identity at the border. Also included within Bravo is El Cruce, an audiovisual work that underscores the river’s dual role as a life source and militarized boundary through scenes of baptism, fishing, and migrant stories. With accompanying texts by Salvadoran migrant Dominick Bermúdez, thinker Albert Corbí, and artist Alejandra Aragón, as well as an interview with the artist, Bravo is an urgent and poetic meditation on a border defined by contradictions—where hope, despair, movement, and stillness converge.
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About the Artist
Felipe Romero Beltrán (b. 1992) is a Colombian photographer based in Paris. Beltrán focuses on social issues, dealing with the tension that new narratives introduce in the field of documentary photography. His practice, characterized by its interest in social matters, is the result of long-term projects accompanied by extensive research on the subject.
Beltrán completed a PhD in photography at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2023. His acclaimed series Dialect was published by Loose Joints in 2023 and was shortlisted for Photobook of the Year at the 2023 Aperture–Paris Photo PhotoBook Awards. Romero Beltrán was the winner of the 2023 Paul Huf Award, the 2023 KBr Photo Award, the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Prix pour la photographie du musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac 2024, and is shortlisted for the Prix d’Elysée 2025.
https://feliperomerobeltran.com
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About the Publisher
Loose Joints is a multi-award-winning independent publishing house based between Marseille and London, founded by Sarah Chaplin Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014. Loose Joints collaborates with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form. With a distinctive editorial approach, we seek to elevate underrepresented voices and introduce new visual perspectives. Our holistic approach to publishing allows us to work closely with artists from start to finish, with all design, editing, and production handled in-house. Loose Joints also operates independently as a design studio.
https://loosejoints.biz/
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