The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
Review by Melanie Chapman · Brian Rose is an accomplished photographer, but he is also a masterful magician. Not in the pull a rabbit out of a hat sense, but rather in the make order out of chaos and pull forth sounds and smells from still images version of magic. This is a skill he... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill · Brave River is the 2026 image-text photobook produced in collaboration between photographer Todd Morten and writer/poet Tim Z. Hernandez, released by Mouthfeel Press. Both authors are based in the American borderlands and have developed other works about the landscape and its inhabitants in recent years. Both are motivated by... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · No wonder many photographers have given up using photography to hunt down and capture individual images of things seen in the world. Today with photobook publishing so accessible photographers have other possibilities. Exploring your past, for example. Or your family relationships. Or a particular historical time and place. Or, as... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Is it just my impression or are there fewer photobooks today about observed, external, “objective” reality and more about the inner reality of relationships and personal situations? Photographers are using books to explore their lives and experiences – mothers and daughters, daughters and fathers, brothers, sisters, parents, families. Elizabeth Clark... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · “My roots in the South extend from Alabama to Kentucky, including Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee. When I go back and set foot on the ground where my ancestors lived, whether it’s in Tennessee or at a family reunion in Warrenton, North Carolina, I am connecting with the power of my... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · I recently read someone’s comment that there are two kinds of photobooks, art books and story books. A possible third category could be concept books. El Retrato De Tu Ausencia is definitely based on a concept, an approach, an original idea. The author, Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, rephotographed Ciudad Jaurez newspaper... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Disarmingly direct and unassuming, Tom Lyon and Pauline Vanden Neste’s On est venus ici pour la vue presents people and places in the Aurore neighborhood of Brussels, Belgium. Built in the 1960s, the neighborhood comprises seven high-rise apartment blocks set among green spaces along a canal. Like other engineered housing... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 