The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Douglas Stockdale • This book is about an enduring love story between two individuals, Blieke and Nicole, with a few twists. As they tell it, they met at a mental institution, as we later learn, Nicole has severe anxiety attacks, while we surmise that Blieke met Nicole while he was visiting his lover... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Mutual admiration between two photographers can be extraordinary, especially when it stimulates new work and when it happens across cultures. Even more important, this universal theme of life and death leaves no one untouched. Nobuyoshi Araki had seen Juergen Teller’s project Leben und Tod including pictures of his grieving mother... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Sometimes a photobook can really get to you, with a narrative that is quite real. At the same time, while it may be full of mystery, the visual and verbal narrative that expresses the truth behind the mystery with all its unsolved challenges is so direct and insistent that it... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • In her self-published book, All The Days of Your Life, Erica Ann Flood transports us on a short and intimate journey through the various aspects of life. One that at times seems to pass by too quickly. Her narrative appears to utilize a time-based sequence in her documentary style photographs; we... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • During these past few months of the pandemic, haven’t we each found ourselves staring out windows, looking for signs of life, and longing to travel near and far once again? Dotan Saguy’s newest work Nowhere to Go but Everywhere arrives at a perfect time. Even if the book’s title, taken from... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • What meaning could you find in a collection of picture postcards sent to one person? And what if you only looked at the pictures, not the messages on the back? And what if you then picked out only the ones with a certain orientation? What could such an arbitrary approach possibly... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • One error in judgment, a lifetime of suffering … In this book, the courageous Hannah Kozak allows us to share her struggles with her mother who left her first husband and five children, including Hannah, for an abusive drinker who in a final blow caused her permanent injury, including brain... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Planning a photobook and assembling all the images needed to tell your story is a process that can take years. Unless you’re Lukas Birk, who did it all in one day. Birk is an Austrian photographer, archivist, and publisher. He has travelled the world producing complex books and curatorial projects in... Continue Reading →
Review by Madhu Joseph John • Art book critics generally use criteria such as contents and caliber of images, layout, production niceties, such as quality of paper, design, and above all, the originality of the subject matter to analyze books they wish to review. In House Music, a photobook by Charles Rozier, many of these... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Around 2006, San Francisco photographer Alan Ostreicher got a simple idea: Why not document life in his apartment? It would be a personal project, not necessarily intended for anyone beyond him and his wife. Who else would want to capture such mundane subject matter anyway? Jump ahead to the pandemic of... Continue Reading →
