The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Amanda Marchand’s artist book, The World Is Astonishing With You In It - A 21st Century Field Guide to the Birds, Ferns and Wildflowers, is a slender photobook, minimalist by design, nevertheless delivering a solid punch. This body of work is an emotional response to her natural subjects, similar to her earlier... Continue Reading →
Reviewed by Rudy Vega • The cover of Julie Blackmon’s Midwest Materials depicts the following: four children-all of which have their faces turned away from us, the viewers. They are caught in mid-stride–two girls skipping towards the wall of the building marked by the name of the book- Midwest Materials, while another has arms stretched skyward... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • “Beauty is where you find it,” said the great philosopher Madonna, who lived for a while on her way to stardom in the neighborhood of Corona in the borough of Queens, New York. She is among many notable one-time residents, including Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Martin Scorsese, and Archie Bunker. Corona... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 40th and mid-summer Issue •We have an extensive list of photobook reviews that we published in July to help you with your summer reading. This will help us coast through the month of August while we will be on holidays for much of this month as well. All in preparation for the Fall... Continue Reading →
Book review by Rudy Vega • As art mediums go, photography situates itself nicely as a means to aid in recollecting. Photography assists one in filling gaps left by the leaky apparatus known as our memories. Photographic images are still open to interpretation, but placed within the appropriate context can be powerful triggers, enabling one to... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • The mystery that is India, “where you can touch what is most essential, where life and death are always side-by-side.” This is the subject of the new photobook by renowned colorist Harry Gruyaert, representing a dozen trips made over the span of forty years. In his introduction, Magnum photographer Gruyaert reflects on... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • As I looked through Ara Oshagan’s 2021 monograph displaced, for some odd reason I was reminded of James Agee’s 1941 study of tenant farming in the American south, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. There is a surface level of similarity in that both books are, in a sense “documentary” - considerations of the lives of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The hills and hollers along the Appalachian Mountains running down the eastern United States are steeped in folklore and folkways. In From Yonder Wooded Hill, photographer Riley Goodman spins a narrative tale from his experiences there and the stories he heard growing. Drawing from his own photos, archival images, short passages of text and poetry,... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 39th Issue • We again greet the summer with a selection of photobooks for you to consider for your holidays and vacations plans. We are also delighted to provide six photobooks supporting Ann Mitchell's latest Thinking About Photographyshowcase, Place. Concurrently we are aghast and severely disappointed with many of the recent American Supreme Court decisions that are being handed down by a super-majority of ultra-conservative justices. On... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega • Japan is a country of four distinct seasons. Hot, humid and rainy summers followed by mild pleasant autumn complete with fall colors. Then winter sets in for four months of frigid cold snowy weather. But with the arrival of spring comes renewal as symbolized by the cherry blossoms or Sakura as... Continue Reading →
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