The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Martin Toft, Te Ahi Kā (2018) We have just passed by our second month as a magazine and launched Issue #2, which might also be considered a (newsletter-summary of what we have published this past month. As a subscriber, you get each book review hot off the press. As a new contemporary photobook magazine (yes, our... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • “. . . we went up to Mangapapapa to establish a place of wānanga for the river and it's many connections through whakapapa.” That neatly sums up Te Ahi Kā: The Fires of Occupation by photographer Martin Toft. But it takes quite a journey up the Whanganui River on the north... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • What is a museum? One brief definition is offered by Wikipedia; an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Then what is an imaginary museum? This is the subject of Julia Borissova’s recent photobook Nautilus. Borissova’s urban setting for... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • As a college student in the early 1980s, I had my first opportunity to visit the beachfront area of Atlantic City, the coastal town in New Jersey that inspired the board game MONOPOLY. Being from California, I was familiar with West Coast beach scenes that included palm trees and attractive... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • The foil embossed book cover with undulating lines of the type font appears as though it is shimmering in the humid heat provides a hint as to what lies within. The third image in Arturo Soto’s photobook, In the Heat, is a wonderful sublime urban landscape photograph of Panama that... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The renowned photographic artist Keith Carter has been called a “poet of the ordinary,” and this sumptuous new retrospective is truly an epic poem, lyrical yet down to earth. Fifty Years is epic in size and scale. The 320 unnumbered pages include 267 images from his half-century (so far) career. They... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • I Don't Explain. Urban street art, graffiti and variations of guerrilla art make for a tantalizing photographic subject; intensively colorful, graphic, layered, complex, playful and temporal. Investigating urban site art has a tradition that can be traced back the Abstract Expressionistic photographic work of Aaron Siskind. In the reading of... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When you first look at the cover of this photobook, a number of unusual features immediately become apparent: The cloth binding is a glorious purple, the color of royal and religious accoutrements. The edges of the pages are graced with glorious gold-leaf, historically the mark of a very important book.... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • TJ Norris has recently released his first monograph, Shooting Blanks, that investigates the potential abstract and graphic patterns created by commercial signage that is in a state of disuse or disrepair, aspects of the modern urban landscape. That these signs are now “blank” is a small aspect of this body... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • I had the good fortune to discover Dia Yunzhi Wang at the Photo LA Show in February 2019, at the SoPhoto Gallery (Beijing), managed and curated by Hongjie Ma, eminent photographer and Chinese National Geographic editor. Her work impressed me immediately – she effectively handles the range from contemporary cultural... Continue Reading →
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