The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · Photobooks are a great medium for telling stories, but also for re-creating emotional landscapes. Alex Blanco’s Meat, Fish, and Aubergine Caviar does both and also mixes in memories, cookbook recipes, and idealized fantasy. If this sounds like a lot it is because the book operates simultaneously on several levels, like... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp · Geir Jordahl’s 2025 monograph The Endless Sphere of Time is an imposing volume, ten inches square and an inch and a half thick in its hard, cloth-covered slipcase. Even before looking inside, the book reminds me of nothing so much as an atlas, a bound collection of maps. In particular,... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · Imagine, if you will, a couple stripped down to their underwear, together leaning against a tree along a lakeside beach in Cheryomushki, Siberia. It’s hard to determine the variety of tree but it bends like it was designed to cradle the woman. The couple looks a little intoxicated, giving the... Continue Reading →
Text and photos by Hans Hickerson · Photobooks were visible everywhere this year in Arles at the 2025 photo festival. The official program included a book market as well as prizes for photobooks in several categories. The book market took place in two separate venues, but there were also a number of unofficial events, including... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • You’re in the eye of the storm…you’ve seen the chaos and change that just occurred and in the not-too-far distance, you see more coming. Through Gray’s images, this is the storm’s eye view of mankind’s interaction with the planet and the mostly uncertain nature of that contact. You're standing on the... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega · Lycien-David Cséry’s Cracks and Dents is a meditation on imperfection, but it’s also a study in abstraction—one that draws as much from the language of painting as it does from photography. Taken between 2016 and 2018, the images document the dents, rust, and impromptu repairs found on the surfaces of... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Context is everything, and without it you are lost. If you look at the 48 photographs in John Volynchook’s Faultlines by themselves, you would not know what country you were in, or even what century. They depict timeless views of nature, all except two photographs where you see tractor tire... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Woven into the pages of Allison Grant’s almost family album Within the Bittersweet are questions that pack a punch. What future are we giving our children? What will the land that they inherit look like? Will they grow up physically scarred by the way we have treated our environment? How... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This book is more experience than observation, more emotion than entertainment, more subtle and captivating than literal and descriptive. The volume is finely made, medium weight…two hundred twenty-seven fascinating pages filled with meditative styled images not typically brought together in such an immersive volume. And, immersive it is…slowly wrapping itself around... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · The Future Without You is a great example of the reality of today’s interconnected world: transparencies of stock photos made in the US in the 1990s, rescued decades later from a recycling center in China by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, printed as a book in Belgium in 2023... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 