The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · If you haven’t visited Fairfield, Illinois, you might be excused for thinking it looks like Nathan Pearce’s photographs. I hadn’t, so I googled Fairfield and traveled down Main Street via Street View. I did not spot any vegan restaurants, food carts, indie record stores, e-bike shops, or comedy clubs. But... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega · Lycien-David Cséry’s Cracks and Dents is a meditation on imperfection, but it’s also a study in abstraction—one that draws as much from the language of painting as it does from photography. Taken between 2016 and 2018, the images document the dents, rust, and impromptu repairs found on the surfaces of... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Context is everything, and without it you are lost. If you look at the 48 photographs in John Volynchook’s Faultlines by themselves, you would not know what country you were in, or even what century. They depict timeless views of nature, all except two photographs where you see tractor tire... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Woven into the pages of Allison Grant’s almost family album Within the Bittersweet are questions that pack a punch. What future are we giving our children? What will the land that they inherit look like? Will they grow up physically scarred by the way we have treated our environment? How... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Folklore and rituals are vital components of our ancestral heritage. The stories that were told for many generations survive in one form or another and are enhanced as they are told and retold. I am currently investigating creation mythologies of various groups, and it is amazing how much wisdom and... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · The Future Without You is a great example of the reality of today’s interconnected world: transparencies of stock photos made in the US in the 1990s, rescued decades later from a recycling center in China by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, printed as a book in Belgium in 2023... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Moemoeā is not really a book, it is an event. It is a party, a celebration of storytelling, design, illustration, photography, and a cultural reawakening. In fact, Moemoeā is two books that fit together hand in glove. One is a hardback spiral bound fictional story of some ninety pages, The... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · Michael Radford’s and Massimo Troisi’s 1994 film, Il Postino (The Postman) tells the story of an Italian mail carrier named Mario, a peasant on a small island of Italy. He befriends the famed Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. The elder poet is exiled from his homeland for political dissent. Mario, disgruntled... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In Zero Hour, Birthe Piontek continues her exploration of identity and mortality. Known for her psychologically charged portraiture and introspective photographic storytelling (especially in Abendlied, which I reviewed previously), Piontek’s newest photobook connects the personal and the universal in a significant visual narrative. The term “Zero Hour” is historically charged—it... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · Social scientists distinguish between space and place. Space is a location defined by size, distance, and boundaries. Place, on the other hand, is about the social characteristics of these physical locations. Places contain meanings that are derived from the people, social practices, and cultures that comprise them. Meaning becomes emplaced... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 