The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Rudy Vega • In The Flow of Light Brushes the Shadow, Douglas Stockdale has produced an artist book which sets out to visually articulate his anxiety felt as a traveler. The book is part therapy, an exercise in search of catharsis. Stockdale uses the aesthetics of the photographic medium as a vehicle to navigate 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 Douglas Stockdale • I may not be a relationship expert, but I highly suspect that stating the reason for another person to stay in a relationship is that otherwise if they left all of the plants would die may not be the most enticing of rationales. The book’s title appears to be a retrospective... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This photobook presents quite a challenge, and I found it also deeply touching in many ways, having spent several weeks with it ... and I am not done yet, by far. So many discoveries ... Helga Härenstam came upon a nearly 300-year-old poem, James Thomson’s The Seasons. That work, popular... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This large and colorful collection of images represents a fruitful intersection of fashion photography and fine art. Tim Walker is a joyful interpreter of contemporary culture; he intensifies interpretations of reality with surrealistic elements inspired by folklore and a creative and vivid imagination, resulting in a collection of scenes that... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Photography is at its best when it arouses the viewer’s imagination. What, when, where, why – are the questions that can be of foremost concern when we, the viewers, are rattled into participatory looking and are projecting ourselves into images that are presented to us by someone else. Particularly during... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • Gary Green’s monograph The River is Moving/The Blackbird Must be Flying (L’Artiere, 2020) is a beautiful and delicate object. Measuring 6 ½” by 9 ½”, enclosed between plain white softcovers, the book features a perfect binding with visible spine. In this exposed Smythe style of binding, the spine remains uncovered, leaving open the folded... 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 • A densely packed urban environment can overwhelm the senses. The noisy buzz of activity, the jostling sea of humanity amidst a vast variety of aromas permeating the air. Can a single image effectively distill this urban chaos for a viewer? As an ardent street photographer, Ellen Friedlander found that one documentary style... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • “Landfall” is a term to describe an approach to or a sighting of land that signals an arrival at one’s destination at the end of a journey across the sea. Landfall is a physical event, or in Sal Taylor Kydd’s recently released artist book, Landfall, it is both a physical as well as a... Continue Reading →
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