The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • In 1955, a 14-year-old Black youth from Chicago, visiting relatives in the South, walked into Bryant’s Grocery Store in rural Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till wasn’t inside long, but he is said to have whistled at a white woman behind the counter. A few days later his body — beaten, shot, and... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill · A Certain Logic of Expectations, published in 2021 with The Eriskay Connection is the second major book work from photographer Arturo Soto. The book is the result of a five-year odyssey in the city of Oxford, England. It contains 160 pages of 73 color images. The object itself is sized comfortably... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Ben Brody understands the chaos, absurdity, and surrealism of war. He was a combat photographer covering the United States’ involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, which resulted in his acclaimed photobook Attention Servicemember (reviewed here). His new book is an epilogue to that one, and a fitting way to sum up United States’ ill begotten... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · Just like with marriage, our kids do not arrive with user’s manual. It also seems, from my own experience, that the older our children become, the more out of (our) control that they seem to evolve. Which in turn, can be crazy making for both the parents as well as the... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • In that distant era – seemingly so long ago, yet in many ways the world in which we still live – of the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus, all of our lives were shattered and altered in ways we are still crawling from and trying to understand. In that now... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • I discovered the work of Ragnar Axelsson in a slim volume I came across in a small photo bookstore/gallery in Reykjavik in 2014. A part of the Photo Poche Series, published by Crymogea, it was titled simply Ragnar Axelsson. I loved the book’s compact size – it suggested to me nothing so much as a sketchbook,... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Why would someone carry a 258-page hardcover photobook with them across an ocean and throughout four countries when much of the photographer’s work is accessible on-line? When the book is the new retrospective Vivian Maier published by Thames and Hudson, the only appropriate response is “Why Not?!” - As the “someone” who... Continue Reading →
Reviewed by Madhu Joseph-John • This is what you might first see when you have Pradip Malde’s photo book in your hand: women, young and old, some with head covers, some with razor blade in hand, others grinding a clay like mass with stones, girls with their legs splayed and being held down by women, acacia... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Arab Spring. The Mexican-U.S. border crises. Ongoing strife in Africa. And now the exodus from Ukraine to escape the Russian assault. What to do with all these refugees? Germany, in the wake of the wave of emigration caused by Arab Spring uprisings in 2015, emerged as a beacon of hope by... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • The mystery that is India, “where you can touch what is most essential, where life and death are always side-by-side.” This is the subject of the new photobook by renowned colorist Harry Gruyaert, representing a dozen trips made over the span of forty years. In his introduction, Magnum photographer Gruyaert reflects on... Continue Reading →
