The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Lisa McCord’s “Rotan Switch” is a superb synthesis of content, design, and emotion…more than a story, more than photos, more than a book, it’s an experience. The design is unique and subtly compelling. At first look, the white space, the seemingly random text blocks, and the image arrangement didn’t click... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • There can be no doubt that climate change is affecting our daily lives. Nick Brandt is a leading advocate for people and animals threatened by and suffering under these changing conditions. He is also a fantastic impresario of environmental portraits, thinking of unusual perspectives and locations for making a point... Continue Reading →
Guest Review by Lee Halvorsen • Its unique slipcase hints at the book’s story, a glimpse of the author’s relationship with his father and his father’s journey with mental illness. The compelling images are a skilled progression of family snapshot photography and the author’s abstract images brought to life with powerful text and exquisite sequencing.... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp · Gail Rebhan’s About Time, subtitled Four Decades of Photographic Series, is a catalog of a retrospective exhibition at the American University Museum in Washington D.C., on view in early Spring, 2023. Photography is often defined (given the etymology of the word itself) as writing with light. But Rebhan’s work poses the question of whether... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • As I was contemplating this photobook and its narrative, I became more and more engrossed and found it to be a very moving experience. A professional photographer, Preston Gannaway, follows the life of a young kid as he grows up, covering all the formative years following the loss of his... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega • When one begins as a prolific photographer and embarks on creating a visual memoir spanning three generations of family, the outcome could very well be Jim Goldberg's Coming and Going. Indeed, it is. The work is also a scrapbook of unvarnished life, with raw documents presented candidly. Thousands of shutter... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • What a piece of work is man, how ignoble in reason. Consider this quote: “Children and civilians need not die in war. And parents should not have to hold the hands of their dead children, killed by criminals.” If you have a pulse and have been near any form of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • As current events continue to remind us, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is all too often the land of the repressive and the home of the intolerant. Sandy Sugawara and Catiana Garcia-Kilroy explore one shameful example of this dichotomy — the incarceration of 120,000... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 