With FERVOR: The Very Powerful San Simón, Juan Brenner releases a photobook that moves far beyond classical documentary photography. What initially appears to be a visual journey into the spiritual rituals of Guatemala gradually unfolds into a hypnotic exploration of identity, pop culture, faith and resistance in the digital age.
At the center stands San Simón - also known as Maximón or El Abuelo - a fascinating figure suspended somewhere between Catholic iconography, Maya spirituality and contemporary subculture. He wears cowboy boots, smokes Marlboros, drinks Coca-Cola and simultaneously appears in TikTok feeds, WhatsApp stickers and street processions. Not a folkloric relic, but a living symbol of cultural self-assertion. That is precisely where the enormous power of this book lies.
Brenner photographs this world not with ethnographic distance, but with a rare combination of intimacy, visual sensibility and political awareness. Golden jewelry meets traditional Tz’utujil textiles, saturated ritual colors collide with urban surfaces, smartphones coexist with centuries-old spiritual practices. Between masks, smoke, neon colors and improvised altars, an aesthetic emerges somewhere between documentary, fashion, social reality and spiritual fever dream.
Particularly compelling is the way Brenner allows contradictions to coexist naturally. In FERVOR, Indigenous identity, queer communities, digital culture, spirituality and postmodern self-stylization do not cancel each other out - they exist simultaneously. That is exactly what makes the book feel so strikingly contemporary.
Formally, FERVOR belongs to that rare category of photobooks you do not simply flip through, but physically experience. Many sequences function almost like cinematic cuts: abrupt shifts between intimacy and public space, between religious ecstasy and everyday banality, between documentary precision and surreal exaggeration. The double-page spreads in particular unfold enormous visual power - especially when portraits of San Simón appear alongside close-ups of hands, fabrics, offerings or improvised ritual spaces.
FERVOR was published by Eros Publications as a beautifully produced hardcover volume featuring 144 pages and 98 images. With FERVOR, Juan Brenner has created one of the most compelling contemporary photobooks positioned somewhere between documentary, cultural analysis and visual research into the present moment - intense, unsettling, alive and full of conviction.
The project was recently celebrated at Photo London, where the first edition sold out completely during the fair. "London was incredible. We actually sold out all the copies we brought to the fair, which was very special for us, especially as the first title of the publishing house." Andrea Orejas, Founder & Editorial Director, to GoSee
Eros Publications (2025) is an independent publishing house based in Barcelona, dedicated to exploring desire as a vital, transformative, and profoundly human force through photography, art, and critical thought. Founded and directed by a team of women from artistic and editorial backgrounds, Eros Publications positions desire not as lack or commodity but as power in motion, a generative energy that resists dominant logics of efficiency and fragmentation.