The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Janesa Brosnan • “All the world is a beach, and all the men and women merely players in the sand” - Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt, Introduction As a Southern Californian, I have always had memories of playing in the sand and cold water of the Pacific. The beaches that line the Western Coast have... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible – Maya Angelou I am captivated by a photobook’s cover in which it seems to offer two truths, especially when both appear correct. So it is for me with Michele Zousmer’s MIS[S]UNDERSTOOD, a photo-documentary that “explores... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Today is 2025 World Cyanotype Day and I am very honored to share this biographical book review of Anna Atkins (Anna Children, 1799 – 1871) now known as the first person to publish a photographically illustrated book in 1843. She is also a historical enigma. It is purported that if it was... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · How does one confront the memories of loved ones who have left us too soon? This is at the crux of Donna Tramontozzi's poetic mediation of her self-published Long Rememberings of Goodbyes. Historically paintings have been resplendent with representation and symbols that provided coded messages to the reader. This visual narrative concept... Continue Reading →
This Thinking About Photography showcase (publishing, Summer 2025) starts with three independent small presses, Void (Greece), Fraglich Publishing (Austria) and Immaterial Books (IL, USA) that have made the discovery of new talent an essential part of their missions - even helping to grow regional publishing. Then we have a hybrid, RedFoxPress (Ireland) - a partnership... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · With recent social-political events in the United States, I felt it was overdue to review Céline Clanet Photolucida book award, Máze, published in 2009. Clanet’s subject are the individuals and landscape of Norway’s Lapland, a culture that spans four countries far above the Artic Circle, and specifically the Sámi village of... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • If we compare the planet with a communal apartment, we occupy the direst room. - Aleksei Yablokov, Environmental Advisor to Boris Yeltsin The Russian Urals is the subject of Alan Gignoux’s recent artist-photobook, Russian Rustbelt, documenting the Ural industrial region during a residency with the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg in... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp · In 1975 Martha Rosler exhibited a group of 24 diptychs titled “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.” The work juxtaposes banal images (think of Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations) of rundown facades in New York’s Bowery district with text panels listing euphemisms for inebriated states (“blind drunk,” “dead drunk,” “embalmed,” “buried,” “gone”). The... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • The individual street images in Perfect Strangers are delightful and bursting with the emotion and environmental texture of the moment. Teri Vershel connected with people and places so candidly I felt as if I were looking through the camera’s viewfinder with her. In his foreword for the book, Sam Abell called her images... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen · On February 24, 2022, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its neighbor and former ally. Byron Smith was there and for the rest of that year he immersed himself and his camera into the lives and the deaths and the hopes of the Ukrainian community. His mostly black and white... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 