The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Welcome to our 36th Issue •This month we offer another broad survey of artist and photographic book reviews that cover a range of issues. We also welcome a new guest reviewer, Brian O'Neill. Please stay healthy and safe.Douglas StockdaleSenior Editor ____ Book reviews featured in March 2022: Toshio Shibata - Boundary Hunt Toshio Shibata likes to blur boundaries. Between... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • What we find missing in our childhood can sometimes be filled in a bit later in our lives in various ways. So it was with Sonia Lenzi, whose father had not been as accessible in her earlier years as she had wished; in recent years she gained personal access to... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Here’s a tip for photographers who are struggling to find something worth shooting: just look out the window. Catherine Canac-Marquis takes this idea to an extreme in the appropriately titled Every time I walked into my room, I took a picture through the window. Over the course of 17 days in November... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822 – 1865) was a 19th century British photographer who photographed her adolescent daughters, frequently incorporating the use of mirrors and other reflecting surfaces creating multi-faceted portraits and visual narratives exploring self-reflection and introspection. Interestingly little is known of her life, who remains a mystery and what is suspected... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian O’Neill • The Devil’s Pool is a roughly 15-foot-deep by 25-foot-wide basin of water tucked within Wissahickon Valley Park located in Northwest Philadelphia, USA. But, if you Google “Devil’s Pool,” the aforementioned pool does not appear. Instead, you will find “Devil’s Pool, Victoria Falls.” You will read that it is “a tourist attraction in... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Sublimation of grief is a partial remedy that artists can use to make life more bearable. Julia Vandenoever, having lost her mother to cancer and her brother to addiction, was able to see connections between her own childhood and that of her own children growing up, with parallel events and... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Now that new COVID infection rates are decreasing, “the world” seems eager to open up again after more than 700 days of lock down and rationing basic necessities such as food, medicine and even toilet paper. Millions of people have seen restrictions relaxed and have begun traveling again, for business and... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • R. A. Hansen’s photobook, dreaming backwards, is a nostalgic and poetic retrospective of an early body of work set in the rural landscape of middle America, the grand expanses where he was raised in Iowa. Hansen’s photographs are combined with his poems and personal reflections on these poignant early moments of his... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • An apt way to describe Ewa Monika Zebrowski’s artist book, van gogh’s bed, is that it has punctum, a work of art that is imbued with emotional impact. Which also serves as a subtle clue, for those who are familiar with Roland Barthes, the late French philosopher, as to the indirect subject of this body... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Toshio Shibata likes to blur boundaries. Between the natural and the human-made. Between the representational and the abstract. Between photography and drawing. Shibata, one of Japan's preeminent landscape photographers, has focused his attention since the early 1980s on the intersection of nature and infrastructure, finding art in scenes of bridges, dams,... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 