Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect began as a three-year encounter with nine young Moroccan men held in Seville, in the south of Spain, inside a legal procedure that could not conclude quickly. Because they entered the country as minors and could not be verified as adults, their custody remained with the state while they waited for status — a suspension of up to three years in which time itself became punitive. Beltrán, a Colombian photographer based in Madrid, responds to that dead time with the body: a language assembled between documentary photography, performance and collaboration with the men themselves.

Loose Joints published the book in April 2023, with texts in English and Spanish by Caterina Borelli, Albert Corbí, Youssef Elhafidi, Zakaria Mourachid and Ricardo Quesada, and editing by Loose Joints Studio together with the photographer. The Spanish setting is not background but material; the photographs sit alongside video and choreographed movement, and the sequence carries the weight of waiting as a daily, humiliating and endlessly repeated condition. The 176-page volume contains 70 colour plates.

Its interest to a collection lies in that method rather than in any promise of reward. Beltrán folds performance into documentary at a moment when the genre’s authority is contested, and he works with his subjects rather than about them, letting memory, journey and administrative dailiness enter the frame together. The 21 by 30 cm section-sewn open-spine softcover was designed as an object in its own right, and the book was nominated for PhotoBook of the Year at the 2023 Aperture–Paris Photo PhotoBook Awards; the series won the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize, and in 2023 Beltrán received the Paul Huf Award.

Read at this distance, the project retains its argument: that bureaucratic delay is a form of violence, and that photography can find a grammar for it without abandoning the people it depicts.