The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • In the spring of 1975, a budding photographer from Cheyenne, Wyoming, just 21 years old, checked in to a single-room occupancy hotel in Hollywood. During her three-month stay there she created portraits of her fellow residents that launched what would be a long and successful career. “All I had to do was... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • During the COVID-19 pandemic a number of creative projects resulted from the forced need to isolate from one another that substantially reduced our ability to have personal interactions. One such project is the collaborative endeavor by Dawn Surratt and Sal Taylor Kydd that resulted in their self-published book A Passing Song. Similar... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Who has not flown over America’s Great Plains witnessing the immense circular patterns created by the farmers and wondered if these were the inspiration for the abstract artists of the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and the Color Field paintings of the 1960s? For me, these aerial perspectives recall the abstract... Continue Reading →
Reviewed by Madhu Joseph-John • This is what you might first see when you have Pradip Malde’s photo book in your hand: women, young and old, some with head covers, some with razor blade in hand, others grinding a clay like mass with stones, girls with their legs splayed and being held down by women, acacia... 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 →
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 →
Review by Wayne Swanson • “Perverse” is a word that tends to pop up when the work of photographic artist scott b. davis is discussed. Which is strange because other than his willfully lower-case name, davis is not a perverse guy. Approachable, low-key, and easy-going, he’s well-regarded in the Southern California fine art photography world as... 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 →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Anthropomorphism, that is giving human traits or attributes to animals, is probably most applicable when observing primates, those animals we seem to attribute some of their attributes to us an interesting twist on zoomorphism. All the more when the subjects are observed in confined quarters in which we suspect they have... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Perhaps the greatest compliment one can pay a photographer is to be so inspired by their work that you go out into the world and attempt to make pictures in the same vein. Thus, on Christmas Day, Ken Light’s new photobook Course of the Empire compelled this reviewer to drive downtown, seeking images... Continue Reading →
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