The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 Gerhard Clausing • This impressive photobook starts with the well-known quote by George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And sure enough, the publication of this book is very timely, since we again find ourselves experiencing various similar expansive acts of aggression and a variety of autocratic... Continue Reading →
Review by Kristin Dittrich • While visiting the first “Photobook Fest“ on May 22, 2022, a new art fair at ICP New York dedicated to the contemporary photobook, I discovered this wonderful small photobook, like a zine, with the title Fragments. This project tells a strong and visually beautiful story about the immigration of a woman... 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 →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Summer … sunshine … the beach … nuances of reddish hair and warm skin colors: the perfect combination for a carefree holiday feeling – moments of relief from the tedium of everyday stress. These are the perfect ingredients for this project by Joel Meyerowitz; these features captured his attention for... 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 Brian F. O’Neill • The origin of the term mise-en-scène, while it is now most commonly used within media and cinema studies, is attributed to the French writer Alexandre Dumas. Dumas financed and helped design his Château de Monte-Cristo in Port-Marly, France on the outer suburban fringe of Paris, and in so doing named it... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Have you found yourself alone, walking through a familiar urban environment, hardly aware of your surroundings? You walk on autopilot, along a route well known to you, passing by warehouses, office buildings, commercial establishments, and housing complexes with hardly a glance. Your thoughts become introspective, and you are literally absorbed in... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 