The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • Arab Spring. The Mexican-U.S. border crises. Ongoing strife in Africa. And now the exodus from Ukraine to escape the Russian assault. What to do with all these refugees? Germany, in the wake of the wave of emigration caused by Arab Spring uprisings in 2015, emerged as a beacon of hope by... Continue Reading →
Book review by Rudy Vega • As art mediums go, photography situates itself nicely as a means to aid in recollecting. Photography assists one in filling gaps left by the leaky apparatus known as our memories. Photographic images are still open to interpretation, but placed within the appropriate context can be powerful triggers, enabling one to... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • The mystery that is India, “where you can touch what is most essential, where life and death are always side-by-side.” This is the subject of the new photobook by renowned colorist Harry Gruyaert, representing a dozen trips made over the span of forty years. In his introduction, Magnum photographer Gruyaert reflects on... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • As I looked through Ara Oshagan’s 2021 monograph displaced, for some odd reason I was reminded of James Agee’s 1941 study of tenant farming in the American south, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. There is a surface level of similarity in that both books are, in a sense “documentary” - considerations of the lives of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The hills and hollers along the Appalachian Mountains running down the eastern United States are steeped in folklore and folkways. In From Yonder Wooded Hill, photographer Riley Goodman spins a narrative tale from his experiences there and the stories he heard growing. Drawing from his own photos, archival images, short passages of text and poetry,... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 39th Issue • We again greet the summer with a selection of photobooks for you to consider for your holidays and vacations plans. We are also delighted to provide six photobooks supporting Ann Mitchell's latest Thinking About Photographyshowcase, Place. Concurrently we are aghast and severely disappointed with many of the recent American Supreme Court decisions that are being handed down by a super-majority of ultra-conservative justices. On... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill • The origin of the term mise-en-scène, while it is now most commonly used within media and cinema studies, is attributed to the French writer Alexandre Dumas. Dumas financed and helped design his Château de Monte-Cristo in Port-Marly, France on the outer suburban fringe of Paris, and in so doing named it... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Have you found yourself alone, walking through a familiar urban environment, hardly aware of your surroundings? You walk on autopilot, along a route well known to you, passing by warehouses, office buildings, commercial establishments, and housing complexes with hardly a glance. Your thoughts become introspective, and you are literally absorbed in... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega • Japan is a country of four distinct seasons. Hot, humid and rainy summers followed by mild pleasant autumn complete with fall colors. Then winter sets in for four months of frigid cold snowy weather. But with the arrival of spring comes renewal as symbolized by the cherry blossoms or Sakura as... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • While we at PhotoBook Journal tend to defer from broad thematic photobooks with a multitude of contributors, and in general the illustrated catalogs for exhibitions usually have little design and layout merit. I take exception with the recent exhibition publication in conjunction with Harvard Art Museums being very worth investigating. The exhibition and... Continue Reading →
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