The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
Due to the immense number of new photobook publications, we felt the need to change how we accept book submissions. We are now asking you (Artist, Author, Photographer, Publisher, Publicist) to submit your photobook submission request directly to a book reviewer who is most aligned with your publication. Please submit to only one reviewer, otherwise... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp · Frank Rodick’s monograph, The Moons of Saturn, has been sitting before me on my desk for quite some time (I will not embarrass myself by revealing just how long) – a testament to its unsettling yet spellbinding mystery. In looking through it, I am reminded of W.G. Sebald’s novel, The Emigrants, the sense of disintegration in these images... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Lynn Alleva Lilley’s photobook The Nest rewards careful as well as casual looking. A finely observed and lovingly chronicled portrait of the woods near her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 98 photographs it builds up overlapping layers of detail, form, relationship, and metaphorical resonance. Like the photographs of other artists who... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Rose · During the 2020 pandemic, Bethany Jacobson escaped the confines of her apartment and took to the winding paths of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. For those of us in New York, the whoops and wails of sirens seemed never to cease, a constant reminder of the presence of disease and death in... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • …pictures have an uncanny ability of suggesting that there is another world…They represent a sense of otherness. The figures in photographs have been muted, and they stare out at you as if they are asking for a chance to say something. - W.G. Sebald The concept of the “uncanny,” which Sigmund Freud... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 