The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · Photobooks are a great medium for telling stories, but also for re-creating emotional landscapes. Alex Blanco’s Meat, Fish, and Aubergine Caviar does both and also mixes in memories, cookbook recipes, and idealized fantasy. If this sounds like a lot it is because the book operates simultaneously on several levels, like... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Woven into the pages of Allison Grant’s almost family album Within the Bittersweet are questions that pack a punch. What future are we giving our children? What will the land that they inherit look like? Will they grow up physically scarred by the way we have treated our environment? How... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · You can’t thumb through some photobooks. You have to look at them front to back and read the texts, otherwise they don’t work. Jordan Baumgarten’s Family Tree Removal is like that. If you don’t read the text, you don’t understand what the pictures and the book are really doing. I... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The press release for this photobook states, “Vanishing is an unforgettable depiction of how beauty and brutality coexist in the hearts of men and beasts.” I would go even further: Vanishing is the definitive depiction of the range from every imaginable positive daydream through the weightiest nightmares possible, from the... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · As a rule of thumb, photobooks are interesting in inverse proportion to the amount of white space surrounding the photographs. The more white space – the more the photos adhere to a fine print aesthetic – the more the book typically functions as a themed album and the less it... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega · Puking Rainbows, Past and Future is a captivating collaborative project by Sean Lotman and his son Tennbo, blending the boundaries between photobook and artist book. Encased in a cardboard slipcover adorned with Sharpie doodles and Instax prints—featuring individual portraits of the duo on the front and back—each copy is a... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This artistic photobook gives you the impression of looking through a universal family album that encompasses more than your immediate surroundings. It gives you a look into the past that seems like an ambiguous societal cross section, a composite view with many personal nuances. Not only that, but photographs printed... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Good things come in small packages. Grenades come in small packages too, and you can compare Richard Zybert’s 1981 photobook Notebook on Time to a small explosive charge. Notebook on Time is the story of Zybert coming to terms with his dysfunctional family and in particular with the legacy of... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson • Part of the fun of reviewing photobooks is getting under the hood and taking a book apart to see what makes it work. Sergey Bykov’s photobook After Us is a good candidate for a closer look, as it resists easy analysis. Or rather there is an obvious reading but then... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This small artist book presents a large challenge. Swedish photographer Helga Härenstam has created a hand-assembled photobook of 34 images just about 4 1/2 inches square in overall size; there is no text inside, so you are dependent on your reactions to the images and on your intuitions. The title... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 