"How to flip through photobooks online? Andrea Copetti (TIPI Bookshop) showing the materiality of printed photography with short videos"

Reverseau, Anne
(2025) Publishing photography : materialities, narratives, assemblages — Location: Funchal (Madeira) (19.November.2025)

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Abstract
Pictures and videos of books handled by anonymous hands are a real trend online, especially on Instagram. Many readers, authors, booksellers and curators like to convey a sense of materiality and appropriation of this very special object. When it comes to photobooks – particularly those printed in limited edition –, videos become even more important. Mimicking the gaze of a reader, they offer a way to compensate for physical absence. Videos convey a sense of materiality, especially mixed materiality when the book includes calques, folded pages, and so on. Filming photobooks reveals the composition, the rhythm created by alternating text and image, the double spreads and the sequences (Humblet 2016); it also communicates a sense of narrativity. These videos, common online but also in exhibitions (for instance at the photography festival “Rencontres d’Arles”), are not just a stopgap but are becoming a way to look at photographs per se. What is at stake in this way of communicating about a book? Are these videos a curatorial gesture? My hypothesis is that these videos represent a “non-canonical or hybrid format” (CFP) of publication, an alternative to more conventional and automated slideshows: there is someone browsing through the book and this presence is meaningful. Some videos resemble digital experiments and serve as ideal case studies of “relationships between printed images and digital environments” (CFP). In this paper, I would like to focus on the videos made by Andrea Copetti, a bookseller specializing in photobooks. He began filming his hands flipping through photo-illustrated books when he opened TIPI bookshop in Saint-Gilles (Brussels) in 2012. This quality bookshop, full of self-published works, is a hub for small editions and the dissemination of photography in Belgium and beyond. My paper will be based on a corpus of his videos (https://www.tipi-bookshop.be/collections/combo) and on first-hand testimony from Andrea Copetti. I have already conducted interviews with him, which led to a publication on the contemporary editorial world (Copetti Reverseau 2025). I would like to expand on what he mentioned in this interview: “Showing how a book can be flipped through is not advertising in the strict sense of the word” (“Montrer comment un livre pourrait être feuilleté, ce n’est pas faire de la publicité à proprement parler”). New interviews will allow me to explore further the meaning of filming photobooks in action. This paper is part of my new research project on images of gestures involving books. This project will culminate in an exhibition in Brussels (Wittockiana, Fall 27) called “Books in hand”, and the videos by Andrea Copetti will be included in the digital corner of the show. As a specialist of gestures with images (in the frame of my former research project, HANDLING, f.i. Desclaux et al, 2025) and the history of photobooks, I would like to focus here on the material and digital presence of photobooks after publication and, more broadly, on the connections between communication, valorization and curation.
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Reverseau, A. (2025). “How to flip through photobooks online? Andrea Copetti (TIPI Bookshop) showing the materiality of printed photography with short videos”. Publishing photography : materialities, narratives, assemblages, Funchal (Madeira). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/270681