Karma
A photobook of drivers caught by flash through their car windows on the streets of Madrid, and the winner of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award in 2013.
Monzón made the work in Madrid between 2009 and 2013. He photographed drivers and passengers from outside the car, firing a flash through the glass, and set those close-ups against headlights at night, bodywork and bare skin. The publisher's text points to Luc Boltanski's idea of the car as a second body: the one object that encloses us completely and that we steer from inside, a private room parked in public space. Sixty-nine colour photographs fill 128 gloss-laminated pages behind a high-gloss black cover that carries the white K of the title, cropped by the edge of the sheet. Eloi Gimeno designed the book. RVB Books in Paris and Dalpine in Madrid published it together in 2013 and reprinted it in this second edition in 2014.
Óscar Monzón (b. Málaga, 1981) is a photographer, video and sound artist who co-founded the Madrid collective Blank Paper and was a member from 2003 to 2017. His work has been shown at Le BAL and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Foto Colectania in Barcelona and the Rencontres d'Arles. Karma was his first book. It was followed by Éxtasis (Dalpine, 2017), Order (RVB Books, 2021) and Sumer, with a text by Arthur Larrue, announced by RVB Books for 2026.