The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Since its beginnings 200 years ago, photography has occupied an uneasy territory between what is seen and what is not. Photographs record moments that have already vanished; they transform the visible world into a trace of itself. In A Lineage of Spectral Femininity, Hali Autumn embraces this condition not as... 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 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 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 →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Those of us who have undergone operations know about the many forms of mental and physical anguish these entail, as well as about the stamina, fortitude, and patience we as patients are expected to muster during the whole process, before, during, and afterward. When it comes to very serious operations... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • In considering Miro Kuzmanovic’s Signs by the Roadside, one would do well to keep in mind the title while moving through the book. For what does a road sign do but orient the traveler to where one is and where one may be headed? The traveler depends on signs for... Continue Reading →
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 →
PhotoBook Journal 