The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Front Cover, Blue Bar Rear cover, Blue Bar Review by Douglas Stockdale • The humidity and occasional fog derived by the proximity of a river can create beautifully dreamlike conditions or provide a mysterious backdrop for a creepy event. Between these these two polar opposites is a low-contrast environment that elicits a kind of gloominess,... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • From time to time we wonder what life is all about. Special moments and places can intensify such musings, for instance, when we are looking at a wonder of nature, such as a giant gorge cut into a wild landscape – like a giant throat ready to consume us –... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • While reading one of John Steinbeck’s many novels did you at one time attempt to visualize his Salinas Valley landscape that was seriously impacted by the pervasive drought conditions of the 1930’s? Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother may have come quickly to mind or perhaps the Dust Bowl photographs of Arthur Rothstein... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Stones, rocks, and mountains come in endless sizes and shapes and are composed of a variety of materials. They are the building blocks of the earth, its very foundation. Leave it to Claudia den Boer, an innovative photographer with a sense of place, to photograph these “stonescapes” and to work... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Regina Anzenberger’s Roots & Bonds is a self-published book that appears to be a mash-up of Paul Caponigro photographs and Abstract Expressionism artwork while reading like we are peeking into an artist’s private sketch book. Even more so when we find images with her hand-written notes in the margins of the... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • My wife’s opinion about this book is that it “brilliantly captures the spirit of California and should be on every coffee table.” Well, there you have it, I thought, why do a whole book review? But I know what our dedicated audience expects and what our editorial policy requires, so... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • Searching for Stillness Vol II is Michael Behlen’s 2019 follow-up to his 2013 Searching for Stillness Vol I. Volume II is a delightful object which challenges the notion of what might be meant by photobook. In fact, it might be better described as a photobox. The book itself is a slim, perfect bound... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega • Satoshi Hirano’s Reconstruction documents the large-scale redevelopment of Tokyo’s Shibuya station. Reconstruction is the culmination of a photography project Hirano pursued from 2014 to 2018. Portraying a nocturnal view, Hirano provides an insider’s look to the ongoing expansion of the station, offering the viewer access that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • How might we ‘see’ the unseen, whether it is too microscopic to discern, moving too rapidly to distinguish or in the case of the root structure of trees and vegetation, buried out of sight? Likewise, how might we imagine something as indiscernible as moisture and water moving within a root structure... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Jakob de Boer takes us on his mystical and mythological journey into the Pacific Northwest, a place of memories, and the resulting black and white landscape photographs become meditative poems. His narratives encompass abstract and ambiguous shapes and forms that explore the black and white scale. Other photographs are inclusive... Continue Reading →
