The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Rich-Joseph Facun’s 1804 examines Athens, Ohio, an Appalachian town whose economic and cultural life is closely tied to Ohio University. Rather than constructing a conventional documentary narrative, Facun structures the book through a carefully paced sequence of portraits, architectural observations, and quiet still-life fragments. As the images accumulate, the photographs... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · To write or not to write, that is the question photographers ask when assembling their projects into books. What do you say to accompany your photographs? What needs to be said that the photographs do not already say? Will the viewer understand what you are doing if you do not... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · “Although we can refer to much of my work as memory-inspired, I like to think of it as documentary in nature. It serves as a historical record of urban changes, which for the most part appear invisible.” – Waisman, p. 1. Sunset Colonies: A Visual Elegy to South Florida’s Mobile... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Dropping jaws do not make noise, and neither do smiles. If they did, you would be able to hear people looking at Xenia Nikolskaya’s Plastic Jesus. Nikolskaya’s book is a collection of photos of religiously-themed merchandise interspersed with interior views of Egyptian Coptic Christian monasteries. In her photographs the objects... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · A heartfelt plea, a cri de coeur documenting the ravages of poverty in the United States, Matt Black’s American Artifacts reads like a contemporary complement to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Unlike the single location of the Evans / Agee book, Black traveled over 100,000 miles around the US... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Paolinelli’s powerful images immerse us in the artistry, mechanics, family, faith and community of Albuquerque’s Lowriders. The images are intense, a brilliant mixture of color and black and white bringing each page alive while blending perfectly into a single, heartfelt story. Many of the images are captioned with names and places... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Sometimes it takes time to figure out a photobook. Robert Adams’ 1985 Summer Nights is one of my all-time favorite books, and a year ago I was eager to see what he had done with his 2023 version, Summer Nights, Walking. But I was so disappointed that I almost couldn’t... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · The first photograph in Ruth Lauer Manenti’s new book, 4 Sides of the Table, shows two rulers placed side by side. Both enter the picture from the right, their full-length cut off by the edge of the frame. They look as though they’ve been around for decades and are chipped... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · New photobooks of unpublished early work from well-established (read: saleable) photographers can be hit or miss, some justifying the hoopla surrounding their publication and others not. Martin Parr’s The Non-Conformists, a detailed, well-crafted exploration of an English village, is a thumbs up. Fresh out of university as a young photographer,... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Thomas Hoepker’s DDR / East Germany – Colour Works 1972–1990 is a remarkable photobook, not because it reveals shocking new truths about the German Democratic Republic, but because it insists on looking carefully, patiently, and in color at a place that was more often described than seen. The photographs, so... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 