The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This delightful photographic journey through parts of Mexico is a fun, heartfelt connection to the culture and the car that brings them together. That car, an icon of their national identity, imagination, and energy, is the Volkswagen Bug, The Beetle, and, in Mexico Los Vochos! Villar moved to Mexico in 2016 with... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · No wonder many photographers have given up using photography to hunt down and capture individual images of things seen in the world. Today with photobook publishing so accessible photographers have other possibilities. Exploring your past, for example. Or your family relationships. Or a particular historical time and place. Or, as... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Is it just my impression or are there fewer photobooks today about observed, external, “objective” reality and more about the inner reality of relationships and personal situations? Photographers are using books to explore their lives and experiences – mothers and daughters, daughters and fathers, brothers, sisters, parents, families. Elizabeth Clark... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Move over Barbie and Ken. Make way for Ken and Grant, the homonormative protagonists of Matthew Finley’s An Impossibly Normal Life, a script-flipping fantasy that views the world through a gay lens. The book is an imagined photo album that doesn’t talk about sexual orientation. Instead, it embodies queerness by... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • How well do we know our extended family? How would we connect with our family’s history? What was important to them; their hopes and dreams? What can we truly understand about them if they are no longer able to provide the answers to our many questions? If even a little... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Brooke DiDonato’s Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer subverts everyday life quietly from within. The photographs infiltrate our reality, introducing small impossibilities, spatial contradictions, and bodily misalignments that accumulate into a sustained, disorienting logic, characterizing a topsy-turvy world through a certain amount of disturbance, which in turn invites contemplation.... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Paolinelli’s powerful images immerse us in the artistry, mechanics, family, faith and community of Albuquerque’s Lowriders. The images are intense, a brilliant mixture of color and black and white bringing each page alive while blending perfectly into a single, heartfelt story. Many of the images are captioned with names and places... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · The first photograph in Ruth Lauer Manenti’s new book, 4 Sides of the Table, shows two rulers placed side by side. Both enter the picture from the right, their full-length cut off by the edge of the frame. They look as though they’ve been around for decades and are chipped... Continue Reading →
Review by Olga Bubich · Photobooks have long offered artists a field of expanded possibilities, allowing them to move beyond a single, linear narrative and challenge conventional expectations of what a book could look like. The history of the medium, with examples ranging from the canonical works such as Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) and... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 