The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • Earlier this year, we lost a photographic artist with a truly unique vision when Paula Riff succumbed to cancer. Yet this diminutive Los Angeles artist with an outsized personality left us with a beautiful gift, finished just months before her death. Paula Riff: works on paper, like the artist herself, is... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Abstract art can certainly fuel one’s imagination. When the main attention of a photograph is more diffuse, that is, not so concrete, we can let our thoughts wander, and we can project our own experiences, wishes, and hopes into what is shown or not shown. When individuals and places are... Continue Reading →
I am very honored to announce my third annual book development workshop in conjunction with Medium Photo for next September. Last year this Medium Photo workshop, Developing a Creative Book, due to the COVID-19 pandemic had taken some interesting twists and turns. We ended up having a virtual workshop on Zoom rather than a traditional face-to-face... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • This book is part retrospective with an autobiography about the early phase of Neil Folberg’s long photographic career, and part portfolio for early unpublished body of work. As an interesting combination of biography and portfolio, it is front-loaded with his personal reflections on his career change to photography while studying at... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Many of us have several ethnic groups in our heritage, and we all certainly have lots of ancestors, but not all of us are able to trace our background details more than a couple of generations. And when we look in the mirror, do we recognize parts of those who... Continue Reading →
Although we are not a non-profit organization, we really lack any income, thus essentially a no-profit (low income) organization that is entirely volunteer run. Nevertheless, we do incur expenses to operate, increasingly so these past few years. So we are having our first PBJ fund raiser by selling some photobooks that we think might benefit with a new home. Okay,... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The classic 20th-century typologies of basic building types by Bernd and Hilla Becher are a hard act to follow. But Thomas Kellner puts a 21st-century spin on them in this monograph with the mouthful title Fachwerkhäuser des Siegener Industriegebietes heute (half-timbered houses of the Siegen industrial area today). From the late 1950s to... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • I find surreal one of the most consistently misused of words, not only in art contexts but in general usage as well. Most often the speaker will mean visually fantastic or simply unbelievable. However, this is far from the concept of “surrealism” as offered by Andre Breton in his manifestos. For Breton, surreal meant... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 27th Issue •We have begun our summer reading and hope you will consider some of our recently featured books to join you on your holiday adventures. Douglas StockdaleSenior Editor ____ Book reviews for June 2021: Carissa Dorson - Conversations with Dad Communicating with one’s parents can be quite a chore, no matter at what age... (more) ____ Cyrilla... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • It is possible to develop many misconceptions about people and countries that we don’t know much about. Some of those views may be based on one-sided reports and specifically slanted selections of what is shown and described to us. It is equally common for journalists and photojournalists to concentrate on... Continue Reading →
