The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Welcome to our 28th Issue • We are hoping you are enjoying your summer holidays and vacations. We are continuing our book sale fund raiser and really appreciate your responses with book purchases and donations. These make a difference and keep us going. Thank you! I am very delighted to work with Medium Photo again this fall to lead my Zoom creative book workshop, an... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • No doubt street photography can benefit from some creative new approaches. Gone are the days of garnering attention by showing the ubiquitous downtrodden and certain other predictable scenarios that we have seen many times before. Vasco Trancoso, a retired physician, whose career involved keeping things going in his patients’ bodies,... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Earlier this year, we lost a photographic artist with a truly unique vision when Paula Riff succumbed to cancer. Yet this diminutive Los Angeles artist with an outsized personality left us with a beautiful gift, finished just months before her death. Paula Riff: works on paper, like the artist herself, is... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Abstract art can certainly fuel one’s imagination. When the main attention of a photograph is more diffuse, that is, not so concrete, we can let our thoughts wander, and we can project our own experiences, wishes, and hopes into what is shown or not shown. When individuals and places are... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • This book is part retrospective with an autobiography about the early phase of Neil Folberg’s long photographic career, and part portfolio for early unpublished body of work. As an interesting combination of biography and portfolio, it is front-loaded with his personal reflections on his career change to photography while studying at... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The classic 20th-century typologies of basic building types by Bernd and Hilla Becher are a hard act to follow. But Thomas Kellner puts a 21st-century spin on them in this monograph with the mouthful title Fachwerkhäuser des Siegener Industriegebietes heute (half-timbered houses of the Siegen industrial area today). From the late 1950s to... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • I find surreal one of the most consistently misused of words, not only in art contexts but in general usage as well. Most often the speaker will mean visually fantastic or simply unbelievable. However, this is far from the concept of “surrealism” as offered by Andre Breton in his manifestos. For Breton, surreal meant... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 27th Issue •We have begun our summer reading and hope you will consider some of our recently featured books to join you on your holiday adventures. Douglas StockdaleSenior Editor ____ Book reviews for June 2021: Carissa Dorson - Conversations with Dad Communicating with one’s parents can be quite a chore, no matter at what age... (more) ____ Cyrilla... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Looking at the photographs of Jordi Barreras’s photobook, Already But Not Yet, one might mistakenly think that his project was created during the COVID pandemic revealing singular individuals in a vacant megalopolis. Only after close inspection and noting the missing masks, which is a hint, that this is probably not true. This... Continue Reading →
Review by madhu joseph-john • These days the ‘Me Too’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ movements consume our attention. Deservedly so. Yet, consider the fact that domestic violence, gender inequality, sex trafficking, rape, incest and misogyny, all travesties predominantly or wholly victimizing the female, mind you, have been around much longer. Here in the USA, ostensibly the most advanced... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 