The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Steve Harp • Where to begin with Jason Francisco’s Alive and Destroyed? Where does one begin considering, weighing, wrestling with a volume as unsettling and provocative as Francisco’s images of “small and forgotten” sites of the Holocaust across Eastern Europe, made between 2010 – 2019? One place to begin might be with the... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • obelisk: a tapering four-sided shaft of stone, usually monolithic and having a pyramidal apex; SYN: column, daggar, mark, monolith, monument, needle, pillar, pylon, shaft, tower. Gary Green’s 2021 monograph, Obelisk is a lovely book. Softcover, measuring 4 ½” x 9”, it fits comfortably in one hand, reminding me of nothing so much as a... Continue Reading →
Review by Kristin Dittrich • While visiting the first “Photobook Fest“ on May 22, 2022, a new art fair at ICP New York dedicated to the contemporary photobook, I discovered this wonderful small photobook, like a zine, with the title Fragments. This project tells a strong and visually beautiful story about the immigration of a woman... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • I think we would all agree that war is an ugly matter, driven by megalomaniacs – men who have a vast taste for power and control. The cost exacted on individuals and groups on all sides of warfare is always horrendous. Unfortunately, such is currently the case in Ukraine, and... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • As we mature it seems that old family photographs become more bittersweet. Or at least these seem to me. We observe that the many individuals depicted have aged, if not passed, and that our memories of them and related events become more indistinct, as though lost in a midst of time.... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • What we find missing in our childhood can sometimes be filled in a bit later in our lives in various ways. So it was with Sonia Lenzi, whose father had not been as accessible in her earlier years as she had wished; in recent years she gained personal access to... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Sublimation of grief is a partial remedy that artists can use to make life more bearable. Julia Vandenoever, having lost her mother to cancer and her brother to addiction, was able to see connections between her own childhood and that of her own children growing up, with parallel events and... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • During a pandemic, during the worst of the chaos and angst, many of us must have found themselves reflecting on the past framed by the current moment. Sal Taylor Kydd in her latest poetic narrative, Yesterday, appears to pose an intriguing question, when might today start to resemble yesterday? This body of... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The word vale can have a number of meanings. It can imply a farewell, a letting go of things that perhaps are unattainable or forever lost. Or, it can be a valley, a hidden place between hills or mountains that may not be so easy to get to or to... 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 →
PhotoBook Journal 