The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • As you start viewing João Linneu’s JJ VFF VV, you quickly get the idea that joy and pain go hand in hand and that a good portion of stamina pays off. The parents waited ten years to get the OK and participation of their son Valentín for this impressive journey... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · I thought I qualified as prolific. I have three, possibly four, new photobooks coming out this year, for a career total of seventeen, if you include the zines. It is not a competition of course, and not all photobooks are created equal. But check out Robert Dunn’s Ecstatic Light Photo... Continue Reading →
Review by Henry Kallerud · The opening photograph of “April” peers down onto an old house bounded by thick walls of shrubbery. Rissman populates this secluded garden with intimate portraits of people at varying stages of life that appear in non-chronological sequence. They engage their reader in recognizing faces across stages of childhood, adolescence, and... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Here’s a winning formula for doing photography: Carry your camera with you everywhere. Explore the world, what’s out there – people, places, life, reality. Be humble. Be patient. Look at your photographs and learn from them. Don’t let ideas or pre-conceived formulas keep you from recognizing and connecting with your... Continue Reading →
Review by Olga Bubich · Addressing traumatic or otherwise challenging pasts and processing childhood trauma have long been among the most common subjects in photography, and photobooks are no exception. Every year, numerous projects are created, sharing with distant readers stories of close proximity: those of complicated – or non-existent – relationships with fathers, those... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Henri Airo’s Probable Cause could be described as a photobook version of a TV true crime docudrama. It is an investigation into the hit and run death of his younger sister 14 years ago and it also serves to interrogate Finnish social mores surrounding alcohol, including heavy drinking while at... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega · Sean Perry’s Fairgrounds is a modest book in scale but not in feeling. There are no crowds, no bright over the top color, and no appetite for nostalgia as popular entertainment. Instead, the book treats the fairground as a site of afterimage and projection: a place to re-enter through atmosphere.... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman · Brian Rose is an accomplished photographer, but he is also a masterful magician. Not in the pull a rabbit out of a hat sense, but rather in the make order out of chaos and pull forth sounds and smells from still images version of magic. This is a skill he... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • How do you show moods and emotions in your photographs? How are a photographer’s feelings transmitted? And what about the people being photographed, and what do places and environments signal to us? Furthermore, what is the nature of the relationship between the photographer and the model? Such are the issues... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill · Brave River is the 2026 image-text photobook produced in collaboration between photographer Todd Morten and writer/poet Tim Z. Hernandez, released by Mouthfeel Press. Both authors are based in the American borderlands and have developed other works about the landscape and its inhabitants in recent years. Both are motivated by... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 