“When I started taking photographs I was excited at the thought of being able to keep hold of all of the lived moments,” photographer Alba Yruela tells Dazed. “I yearned for the years to fly by so that I could then see the passing of time in all of these photographs.” A decade since she first picked up a camera, the Catalonian photographer has documented the ensuing years in thousands and thousands of film images and has now gathered together over 500 of these poignant and poetic pictures in a new book, Diaris 2009-2019 (published by Terranova and deigned by Gemma Penya Ferrer).

The dreamy collection of images invites us on a journey through a constellation of ephemeral, sensual, sun-lit moments, embroidered together in a loosely chronological sequence. She confesses that her practice of documenting these moments is more than habitual, it is devotional: “I’m driven by obsession-like motives such as nature, the sky, or sea, friendship, my partners, or my own solitude, which I picture in multiple self-portraits. It is important for me that it all feels sincere or personal.” 

The mood of Diaris 2009-2019 is as personal as you’d expect the experience of poring through the pages of a stranger’s journal to feel. While Yruela didn’t begin the project necessarily intending the pictures to be viewed by the public, her images retain that initial quality of intimacy throughout the project even as her conception about the nature of the work has evolved. “Since the beginning, I’ve created these images moved by the idea that I can keep stills from my life in order to remember them as memories. I never thought I was sharing intimacy when I started,” she explains. “Back then, the audience was different and I felt safe sharing intimate photography. As soon as I saw the viewers could also feel my images, I started being conscious of what I was doing and its value.”

How did she even begin to distil a decade of prolific image-making into one book? “Since the beginning of the process, I knew I wanted a book with hundreds of pages. It felt obvious I needed lots of images to describe those ten years,” Yruela tells us. Eventually, she narrowed thousands of images down to approximately 565 photographs each inviting contemplation and reflection. Diaris 2009-2019 is a book to get lost in. Visit the gallery above for a selection of the pictures featured in the book. 

Alba Yruela’s Diaris 2009-2019 is published by Terranova and is available to order now