The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This charming book is a time capsule, Hickerson’s pictorial coming-of-age story. Hickerson hit the trifecta of a learning experience…he loved studying the culture and language of the French, he was studying & living in France, and he was forward looking enough to be taking images of that year. Most of us... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · Social scientists distinguish between space and place. Space is a location defined by size, distance, and boundaries. Place, on the other hand, is about the social characteristics of these physical locations. Places contain meanings that are derived from the people, social practices, and cultures that comprise them. Meaning becomes emplaced... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · You can’t thumb through some photobooks. You have to look at them front to back and read the texts, otherwise they don’t work. Jordan Baumgarten’s Family Tree Removal is like that. If you don’t read the text, you don’t understand what the pictures and the book are really doing. I... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This book is a treasure chest of smiles for the reader, all the fun types of smiles…broad, subtle, ironic, wistful, melancholy, and more! The images embrace the reader’s psyche with comfort and humor, warmth and song, humanity and the sense of being human. The images are stunning and well composed... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Wow. There is a lot to like about Kevin Cooley’s The Wizard of Awe. A happy marriage of book design, storytelling, and photography, it elevates the photobook conversation to a level higher than anything I have seen in a long time. For starters the cover is spectacular. It shows falling... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · It is a good sign when you start looking at a book and cannot put it down. That is what happened to me with Luis Corzo’s photobook, Pasaco, 1996. Corzo uses photos and texts, in English and Spanish, to tell the story of his and his father’s kidnapping for ransom... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The press release for this photobook states, “Vanishing is an unforgettable depiction of how beauty and brutality coexist in the hearts of men and beasts.” I would go even further: Vanishing is the definitive depiction of the range from every imaginable positive daydream through the weightiest nightmares possible, from the... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · The earthIs made of earthAnd I like that stuff Adrian Mitchell, “Stufferation” It’s hard to fully describe the complexity that abounds in flowers drink the river, a book of photographs by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, published by Stanley/Barker and designed by Ramel-Luzoir. It is a rich and compelling story about personal... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian O’Neill · Stephen Voss is a photojournalist. You may have seen his work and portraits in Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post Magazine, and more. As a critic and collector of photobooks, I have a few books by photojournalists on my shelves. Perhaps you do too. They often follow a familiar format of,... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian O’Neill · Climate change, and various aspects of it, from forest fires, to drought, to adaptive landscaping and technologies, as well as oil extraction, have become more and more common within the world of fine art and documentary photography. Often, photographic projects oriented around climate change take an approach to human stories... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 