The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · A photographer working outside the mainstream has advantages and challenges. The challenges include not being networked as an insider and sustaining belief in yourself when you are unknown. Among the advantages is the enormous benefit of seeing with fresh eyes, along with the ability to follow your own path without... Continue Reading →
Review by Olga Bubich · Regardless of their genre, language or author, there is always something common for all the expectations we have of books – whether those are conventional ones or photobooks. It is a story. Indeed, any book ever written or assembled of images has a certain unfolding narrative, a structure suggesting the... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson · In his photobook Fungi, Nicolai Howalt reveals the vivid, otherworldly beauty of fungal mycelium — an organism most of us never actually see. As surface dwellers we primarily encounter fungi as mushrooms, which are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Howalt, however, photographs mycelium, which is normally found below the fruiting... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · In art, as elsewhere, less is often more. Pare something down, eliminate unnecessary details and distractions, reduce it to its essence, and you end up with a core that resonates beyond its supposed limits. Eugene Richards’ New World works like that. His 56 black and white photographs depict scenes from... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · I thought I qualified as prolific. I have three, possibly four, new photobooks coming out this year, for a career total of seventeen, if you include the zines. It is not a competition of course, and not all photobooks are created equal. But check out Robert Dunn’s Ecstatic Light Photo... Continue Reading →
Review by Henry Kallerud · The opening photograph of “April” peers down onto an old house bounded by thick walls of shrubbery. Rissman populates this secluded garden with intimate portraits of people at varying stages of life that appear in non-chronological sequence. They engage their reader in recognizing faces across stages of childhood, adolescence, and... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Here’s a winning formula for doing photography: Carry your camera with you everywhere. Explore the world, what’s out there – people, places, life, reality. Be humble. Be patient. Look at your photographs and learn from them. Don’t let ideas or pre-conceived formulas keep you from recognizing and connecting with your... Continue Reading →
Review by Olga Bubich · Addressing traumatic or otherwise challenging pasts and processing childhood trauma have long been among the most common subjects in photography, and photobooks are no exception. Every year, numerous projects are created, sharing with distant readers stories of close proximity: those of complicated – or non-existent – relationships with fathers, those... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Henri Airo’s Probable Cause could be described as a photobook version of a TV true crime docudrama. It is an investigation into the hit and run death of his younger sister 14 years ago and it also serves to interrogate Finnish social mores surrounding alcohol, including heavy drinking while at... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega · Sean Perry’s Fairgrounds is a modest book in scale but not in feeling. There are no crowds, no bright over the top color, and no appetite for nostalgia as popular entertainment. Instead, the book treats the fairground as a site of afterimage and projection: a place to re-enter through atmosphere.... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 