Txema Salvans’s *Nice to meet you*, published by Editorial Actar in 2005, looks at the family photograph as a social arrangement rather than a transparent record of kinship. Its subjects are groups encountered across Spain: people gathered for leisure, ceremony, or the simple act of being photographed, who may be relatives, strangers, or companions only for the duration of the image. The book’s central proposition is quietly unsettling: a family picture can be produced by composition and expectation as much as by blood.

The photographs bring together bodies that appear to belong to a shared unit, yet their relationships remain unstable. Salvans’s method compresses the long passage of generations into an instantaneous scene, allowing differences of age, authority, vulnerability, prosperity, and misfortune to register within the arrangement of a group. The result is neither straightforward documentary nor invented tableau. These pictures retain the social texture of ordinary life while exposing the conventions through which a group is made legible as a family.

The accompanying text by journalist Guillem Martínez extends this inquiry into the logic of familial images. Together, image and text consider families that may never have existed as families at all, while also acknowledging that even familiar family photographs can contain estrangement, hierarchy, and absence. Salvans’s deadpan attention gives the scenes their distinctive force: what first appears casual or cordial gradually acquires an undertow of uncertainty.

At 380 pages, the Spanish-language paperback is a substantial presentation of a sustained photographic project, with the catalog record also identifying a Spanish and English edition. For collectors, its importance lies in the precision of its premise and in the way its sequencing and collaboration with Martínez turn a recognizable social form—the family snapshot—into a sustained study of how belonging is pictured. It deserves attention as an early-2000s photobook that makes the ordinary group portrait intellectually and emotionally unstable without abandoning its plainspoken surface.