In 2025, photographer Josh Aronson's Photo Book Speed Date landed at the Pérez Art Museum Miami — a long way from a rainy Wednesday night in Thanksgiving week 2022, when the first event ran out of chairs within its opening rounds.

The format is disarmingly simple. Participants bring one photo book that means something to them, sit across from a stranger, and talk about it in timed rotations. A bell. A new partner. A new book. Three hours of seat-to-seat, book-to-book conversation.

Aronson, who is based in Miami, invented the event to solve a specific problem. "In 2022, I had an exhibition at a commercial gallery and wanted to find a way to bring people in," he explains. "An artist's talk felt too self-gratifying. I wanted something more democratic. An event where guests felt just as important as the artist." A speed-date-style photo night in New York, hosted by the artist Shaniqwa Jarvis, planted the seed. Aronson pushed the idea further toward participation: most people who care about photography own at least one book that matters to them, so why not build the evening around what they bring rather than what the artist shows?

The first gathering required almost nothing. "No big budget. No fancy tech. I designed a flyer, shared it online, and set up a few rows of chairs in the gallery," he recalls. "The energy was electric. Communal. Generous. Deeply engaged." People wanted a space to geek out about photo books, and the program grew from there.

What participants reveal through their choices has become central to the project's appeal. Aronson recalls one of the best pieces of advice he ever received: pay attention to who your favorite artists' favorite artists are, and study them. Photo Book Speed Date works the same way — you learn about peers and their influences through what they choose to carry through the door.

The conversations follow a reliable arc. "Why this book? What does it mean to you? How does it relate to your own work?" Aronson says the questions recur every night, and that people get so locked in that he often hates calling the next round.

The outcomes exceed the format's modest framing. A good friend of Aronson's met her boyfriend at a Photo Book Speed Date; Aronson met his own girlfriend there. Beyond romance, dozens of photographers have connected with other artists, publishers and curators. "The goal was never matchmaking," he insists. "It's about opening access and creating a space where people in the photo community can meet in person, inside museum or gallery spaces that sometimes feel off-limits. I want people to feel belonging in those spaces, even just for an evening."

The in-person requirement is not incidental. Books are physical objects — meant to be held, flipped through, and smelled, as Aronson puts it — and the intimacy of sharing one across a table in real time cannot yet be replicated online. Each conversation may last only five or ten minutes, but many continue long after the timer stops. For Aronson, the project is a primer for community connection in a city whose creative ecosystem he is determined to help build: artists have always grown in community with one another, he argues, and 2025 is no different — "It's just our turn to create the spaces where that can happen."

In 2026, he plans to take Photo Book Speed Date to museum spaces around the world, with a West Coast debut in California, a return to New York, and a Miami edition at a venue central to the city's book and art scene.