The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Welcome to our 13th Issue; We continue our quarantine mode during the days of COVID-19. This month we have another diverse selection of photobooks, ranging from Australia conceptual landscapes, the genre of the nude, one painted and the other investigating athleticism, as well as two narratives on the concept of dust, WWII reimagined, and a conceptual contemplation... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Anyone who has put in time on the portfolio review circuit has probably encountered Jonathan Blaustein. He’s that rather intense reviewer with the moustache and goatee who is never at a loss for words, and always quick with a thumbs up or down on your work. He’s also the guy you... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Images in Transition, Wirephotos 1938 - 1945 presents artistic interpretations of wartime wirephotos from the second world war. Wirephoto technology was used to transmit black and white photographs from the war-front back to media centers, in this case located in the United States. Stephen Wirtz collected these wirephotos, and at the... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • German photographer Florian Schwarz takes on the entire universe in his new book A Handful of Dust. Schwarz spent four years traveling to observatories in some of the most remote places on Earth. These observatories, operated by the Las Cumbres Observatory Foundation (LOC) in Santa Barbara, span the globe to allow... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • In Melissa Borman’s self-published book, A Piece of Dust in the Great Sea of Matter, she captures her subjects being actively engaged with the natural landscape as a metaphor for the elements of life. A Piece of Dust, a component of her book’s title, is to place a focus on... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • I believe a photobook based on a body of work that explores the nude form has some high esthetical and contemporary hurdles to overcome; a genre of art that predates photography itself. The nude and semi-nude, both male and female, are frequently subjects for photographers for a wide variety of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • So often, suburbia is portrayed as a bland and vacuous place — tract homes, franchise convenience stores, and a lot of sullen youth. That’s not the way Australian photographer Bill Henson sees it. Through Henson’s lens, suburbia is a dreamscape filled with dark shadows, fluffy clouds, Egyptian ruins, teenage angst, pastoral... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 12th issue • This is our 12th issue, marking the first year of our magazine format. No one anticipated that on our first anniversary the entire world would be struggling with a COVID-19 pandemic. I would like to think this event has provided many of you with more book-reading time and an... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Backstory: Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is a new edition book of classic short, Japanese, horror stories written by Lafcadio Hearn over a century ago. Hearn was an Irishman who was born in Greece, grew up in Ireland, and emigrated to the US where he became a writer. He... Continue Reading →
Review by Madhu Joseph John • They say that the American South is a land in transition what with the incursions of globalization and the migrations of diverse populations. Some of us might be familiar with images of the “new South” depicted by artists such as Eugene Richards, Mitch Epstein, Tommy Kha and Shane Lavalette. Perhaps... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 