Días, published by Loose Joints in 2024, gathers 144 pages of Pia Riverola’s photographs into a sequence built less around destinations than around atmospheres. Riverola, a self-taught Spanish photographer working between Los Angeles and Mexico City, has assembled images from Japan, Spain, and Italy. Among them: rain-glossed nights lit by neon, a tablecloth lifted by a Mediterranean breeze, drizzle falling in a Roman garden. The book’s title announces its structure: a day, or many days, gathered and set in order. Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited and sequenced the volume, and the results lean on motion, blur, and dappled light. The photographs rarely describe places plainly. They arrive at an angle, as if glimpsed while passing, and the tonal collage that results behaves more like memory than reportage.
Riverola’s pictures are candid but not careless. They carry a casual offhandedness, in the publisher’s phrase, closer to an overheard conversation than a staged announcement, and her compositions leave room for obscurity: color drifts, focus softens, foregrounds dissolve. That restraint is the point. The book is designed for accumulation rather than single images, and its small format, 170 by 205 millimeters, asks to be held and read page by page rather than displayed. The debossed quarter-bound hardcover, with 88 color plates, gives the sequence a quiet physical continuity.
The sequence moves between warmth and melancholy without resolving either. Riverola’s travels produce no itinerary and no argument, only recurrence: light, weather, the gestures of people at rest. The effect is cumulative. As the plates advance, the book becomes less a record of specific cities than a meditation on how days are remembered, partially, through color and atmosphere.
For collectors already following Loose Joints’s program, Días extends the publisher’s interest in photographers who treat sequencing as a compositional act in its own right. Riverola’s earlier book Flechazo established her in print, and this second volume shows a more deliberate editorial intelligence at work. The book’s quiet design and its editing by Espenon make it a considered object, one that rewards repeated reading rather than quick browsing.
