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 →
Ekaterina Vasilyeva – Road to Petergof
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 →
Valentina Neri – Almanacco Toilet Club
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 →
Christine Riedell – For Going Out I Was Really Going In
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 →
PhotoBook Journal – Issue #6
Welcome to Issue #6 (September 2019) • September was a busy month for us with a lot of activities around the LACP Exposure Weekend: book design class by Elizabeth Avedon, the LACP Photographic Book Competition exhibition opening and an interesting book panel discussion. Of course, a few book reviews as well. We also welcome Steve Harp, Associate Professor of... Continue Reading →
LACP Exposure Weekend – Photo Book events
By Melanie Chapman and Douglas Stockdale • The Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) 2019 Exposure Weekend, held at the Hotel Mdr in Marina del Rey, California, incorporated a number of photobook events; an exhibition of the first LACP Photographic Book Competition, a one-day book workshop led by Elizabeth Avedon, and Book Panel discussion. Elizabeth... Continue Reading →
Mike Tyka – Portraits of Imaginary People
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 →
Rohina Hoffman – Hair Stories
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 →
Paulo Nozolino – Loaded Shine
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 →
Shane Lavalette – Still (Noon)
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Shane Lavalette was commissioned to follow the footsteps of the Swiss photographer Theo Frey (1908–1997), one of the leading Swiss photojournalists of his day, who had set out in 1939 to photograph the Swiss landscape in for the Swiss National Exhibition. Lavalette investigated the same twelve Swiss villages as did Frey... Continue Reading →