The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill • Fish Story, the last major project/publication by Southern California based photographer, filmmaker, critic, teacher, and theorist Allan Sekula was originally released coincident with a touring exhibition that began in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 1995 and concluded in Kassel, Germany in 2002. In June of 2018, it was re-released by London headquartered... Continue Reading →
Slipcover, George Tice: Lifework Review by Douglas Stockdale • One of my first photobook acquisitions is another retrospective by George Tice – Photographs 1953-1973, which was then a twenty-year retrospective. Now that I am a bit older and perhaps wiser, I am understanding why this earlier book was published when noting that the introduction is by the... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 37th Issue • We present another broad selection of book reviews: a couple of titles that we featured during Earth Day week, one photobook about family that is being highlighted in Ann Mitchell's new showcase about Family and a photobook by one of our own contributing editors, Brian O'Neill. With more vaccinations and a slowing of the COVID... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Toshio Shibata likes to blur boundaries. Between the natural and the human-made. Between the representational and the abstract. Between photography and drawing. Shibata, one of Japan's preeminent landscape photographers, has focused his attention since the early 1980s on the intersection of nature and infrastructure, finding art in scenes of bridges, dams,... Continue Reading →
PBJ Issue Number 35 • February became a difficult month for those who love democracy, with an unrelenting attack of Ukraine by a madman in Russia. We are unsure of how this will end, but I am voting for the people of Ukraine to persevere. Remember, most Russian citizens do not support this war, thus as you consider what Russian goods to... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • I may not be a relationship expert, but I highly suspect that stating the reason for another person to stay in a relationship is that otherwise if they left all of the plants would die may not be the most enticing of rationales. The book’s title appears to be a retrospective... Continue Reading →
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