The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • Every city has one — that neighborhood “everybody” knows to stay away from. It’s too rough, or too hostile, or too unsafe, or just too different in some way or another. For Arnhem, a medium-sized Dutch city near the eastern border with Germany, that neighborhood is Rijnwijk. This insular 100-year-old... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Making It Up: Photographic Fictions by Marta Weiss is an historical survey of photographic works that have been staged or constructed to replicate some scenes of historical significance, or to make a cultural or personal statement. All images come from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • This is a narrative about an indirect journey along the road that connects St. Petersburg to the city of Petergof, where the Russian Tsar Peter the Great built large Russian estates as his equivalence to the 18th century French estates and expansive gardens. This is also an investigation of an... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The ‘Toilet Club Milano’ is an Italian night club that welcomes people of all sexual orientations. It has a special place in the LGBTQ world, and features performers that present themselves in drag. Valentina Neri has woven a fascinating narrative around these ‘drag queens,’ including many visual and verbal cues... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Inspired by the early work of Eugene Atget, the sublime gardens of the French emperors became the subject of Christine Riedell’s first self-published monograph. These expansive “gardens”, which are almost the size of a National park here in the United States, are located in the general region around Paris. Her subjects... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The occupation of land by a hostile foreign power is a phenomenon that seems to repeat itself, over and over, and thus it is an ever-present danger. In our time, the 20th century was not the end of such outrageous acts, as the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula, part of... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In 1992 an intriguing book with the title The Reconfigured Eye was published by MIT Press. In our current age of “fakery,” and especially in hindsight, the subtitle of that book is even more intriguing: “Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era.” The point of that book was that the digital... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Considering that photographer Rohina Hoffman’s day job is as a neurologist studying what goes on in a person’s mind, it should come as no surprise that her first monograph she would focus on what comes out of a person’s head. Specifically, what grows out of a person’s scalp, and how... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • When I saw the title of Paulo Nozolino’s newest monograph, Loaded Shine (Steidl, 2018), I immediately was reminded of Daniel Lanois’ song Shine, the title track of his 2003 album. An idiosyncratic connection, no doubt, elicited by my love for Lanois’s music and Shine is one of his most achingly beautiful songs.... Continue Reading →
