FINAL DISSERTATION - CEU SAN PABLO - 2026

A Way of Seeing.

A research and photography project asking what happens to intention, attention, and authorship when an image can be made — and discarded — in a fraction of a second. Answered through theory, and through a 35mm camera.

Research, Concept & Photography

The Question

  • Images are made faster and forgotten faster than at any point in the history of the medium. What gets lost in that acceleration is not quality but attention: the interval between noticing something and deciding it is worth keeping.

  • The project is grounded in Slow Media and Slow Photography, movements that don't reject technology but resist its cult of speed — proposing depth, craft, and monotasking over reach and virality. Applied to image-making, this means valuing the experience of seeing over the immediacy of sharing.

  • The core claim of the project is that analog photography's limitations — finite frames, no preview, no delete — aren't obstacles to creativity but generative conditions for it. Constraint doesn't reduce authorship; it restores it.

The Question.

We take more photographs than any generation in history and remember almost none of them. This project started as a personal observation — that photography, somewhere along the way, stopped being about seeing and became a reflex. It became a research question: what does the digital image ecosystem actually do to attention, authorship, and meaning — and can a deliberately slower, more constrained process reverse it?

The Copy

Campaign Context

ShelfBreak was born from a single idea: somewhere across the world, someone already wrote your favorite book. You just can't reach it yet. The campaign targets three audiences simultaneously: readers, authors, and bookstores—each with a different entry point into the same idea.

Tone: direct, warm, and purposeful.

Brand Descriptor

Exploring literature from every corner of the world.

Brand Manifesto

Literature is one of the oldest ways in which we have traveled the world. Yet every day, distance, language, and gatekeepers decide whose stories get to travel and whose don't.

We believe literature should do what it was always meant to do—take you somewhere else. Step into another story and, in return, understand more of our world.

When those limits disappear, more voices are heard and more readers are reached.

We come closer together.

Headlines

A. Somewhere across the world, someone just wrote your favorite book.

B. The book you were never going to find in your local bookstore. Now on your shelf.

C. Books can build a bridge between us

Social Captions

For Readers

For the readers tired of always finding the same stories, voices, and ideas.

Explore literature without limits.

For Authors

Your story is ready. There's just nowhere to take it.

Find your place on a shelf anywhere in the world.

For Bookstores

Not all bookstores should be the same.

Stand out with ShelfBreak.