The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · Alex Llovet’s photobook Summer’s Almost Gone is a family album of sorts. The monochrome photos were taken on family vacations from 2016 to 2021. We see the natural world and children in nature, as well as a few photos of adults, presumably Llovet and his wife. I say “of sorts”... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Letters to Azan is about photographer Lali Khalid’s relationship with her son. Khalid is from Pakistan. She grew up and studied there before moving to the US to study photography. Her son Azan was born in the U.S. in 2012. We do not hear anything about Azan’s father, but we... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Captivating! Exotic! Breathtaking! Yes, this book is all of that, but those words understate the exquisite view into nature’s beauty Thomas has wrapped into these pages. The reader experiences relationships among people, horses, eagles, and the land. This isn’t a book about an exciting apex predator or a beautiful but... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Bear with me as I begin with a digression. Have you lain awake at night pondering the mysteries of Roland Barthes’ “punctum?” I haven’t, and I usually find analytics unhelpful to my practice of photography. But I thought about the term again recently and wondered what AI would do with... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This fascinating book blends striking photography with human sociology, using the metaphor of a two-way mirror to reflect a Europe beyond postcards—and the people at its margins looking back. It is puzzling, yes, but undeniably compelling. In Yesilyurt’s opening manifesto, he makes clear that his aim is not to present... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • A gripping tale of friendship and a hidden land is preserved in this story with stunning images from Cuba some thirty years ago. DeStefano traveled to Cuba in 1993, 1996 and again in 1998, during Cuba’s “Special Period” where everything for Cuba’s common person was hard to get…food, gasoline, currency,... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This book is a collection of magical, imaginative moments in what must have been a difficult, almost grieving time for the artist and her father. Her father, mostly “invisible” in the book, was leaving his Amsterdam apartment of thirty years because the building had been sold. He was downsizing and... 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 Lee Halvorsen • Imagine sitting in an overstuffed chair, in a hushed, book-lined sanctuary, completely spellbound by a virtuoso storyteller spinning tales of love, war, resilience, post-war recovery in Europe and the canvas of artistic mid-century New York City. This wonderful collection of firsthand images of post-war transitions in Europe and Manhattan was... 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 →
