The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · How do you determine what a photobook means? Do you read the publisher’s press release and then look at the book? Or do you look at the book to see what’s there and ignore the PR? That’s what I usually do. I figure the book is the final authority, that... Continue Reading →
Yes, it is that time of year again – “Best-of List Time” – and time for us to present our list of interesting photobooks for the past year. As in past years, the books spotlighted feature exemplary form and content, design and photography, vision and execution. Our all-volunteer editorial team has done their best to... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · In much the same way that the Internet has democratized speech but also cheapened it, the ability to produce photobooks easily today is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because photographers can package and share their work with fewer barriers. It is a curse because everyone is... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · The Johnny Chronicles, An Anthology of Love and Absurdity, is a good reminder that one way to evaluate art is to look at how it communicates or offers consequential human experience. The Johnny Chronicles definitely does this. The book fits into the narrative / documentary photobook tradition and you can... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp · Scott Offen’s 2025 monograph Grace is a lovely book. As an object, its beauty confronts the viewer from the first look – the “porthole” opening cut into the cover gives a view of a tipped-in, beautifully subtle gray-scale image beckoning mysteriously to the viewer. The image, of a large, leafy... Continue Reading →
Review by Sebastian Boute and Matt Schneider · Thus, whether riding or walking, the process becomes about forms of reflection. Importantly, it is about the obstruction/mediation. Perhaps it is this kind of limitation that makes knowledge possible – that enacts a kind of deep inscription, if not a mapping, in the artist/writer/photographer/documentarian. And so, what... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Some readers of this review might know what “asa nisi masa” means, but most of you presumably do not. I definitely did not, and so I Googled it, and here is what I found: "Asa nisi masa" is a phrase from Federico Fellini's film 8½ (1963) that is a code... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Where photographer Bruce Haley lives, BLM does not stand for “Black Lives Matter.” It stands for “Bureau of Land Management,” the federal agency that manages some 245 million acres of public land, or about ten percent of the United States, an area bigger than France and Italy combined. Most of... Continue Reading →
Interview by Brian Arnold · I can’t tell a lie – the first time I read Jasper by Matthew Genitempo, I didn’t get it. This isn’t a bad thing, rest assured, because I can say that about many of my favorite books. I think this is largely a result of complexity – in an initial... Continue Reading →
Review and Interview by Hans Hickerson · Publishers of photobooks publish photography books, but sometimes they also publish books about photography books. Jason Eskenazi’s The Americans List, published by Red Hook Editions, is a good example. It is about Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans. Eskenazi asked photographers he knew and met, as well as... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 