The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · Woven into the pages of Allison Grant’s almost family album Within the Bittersweet are questions that pack a punch. What future are we giving our children? What will the land that they inherit look like? Will they grow up physically scarred by the way we have treated our environment? How... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · With recent social-political events in the United States, I felt it was overdue to review Céline Clanet Photolucida book award, Máze, published in 2009. Clanet’s subject are the individuals and landscape of Norway’s Lapland, a culture that spans four countries far above the Artic Circle, and specifically the Sámi village of... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · The Future Without You is a great example of the reality of today’s interconnected world: transparencies of stock photos made in the US in the 1990s, rescued decades later from a recycling center in China by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, printed as a book in Belgium in 2023... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Moemoeā is not really a book, it is an event. It is a party, a celebration of storytelling, design, illustration, photography, and a cultural reawakening. In fact, Moemoeā is two books that fit together hand in glove. One is a hardback spiral bound fictional story of some ninety pages, The... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · Michael Radford’s and Massimo Troisi’s 1994 film, Il Postino (The Postman) tells the story of an Italian mail carrier named Mario, a peasant on a small island of Italy. He befriends the famed Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. The elder poet is exiled from his homeland for political dissent. Mario, disgruntled... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This charming book is a time capsule, Hickerson’s pictorial coming-of-age story. Hickerson hit the trifecta of a learning experience…he loved studying the culture and language of the French, he was studying & living in France, and he was forward looking enough to be taking images of that year. Most of us... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · Social scientists distinguish between space and place. Space is a location defined by size, distance, and boundaries. Place, on the other hand, is about the social characteristics of these physical locations. Places contain meanings that are derived from the people, social practices, and cultures that comprise them. Meaning becomes emplaced... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · You can’t thumb through some photobooks. You have to look at them front to back and read the texts, otherwise they don’t work. Jordan Baumgarten’s Family Tree Removal is like that. If you don’t read the text, you don’t understand what the pictures and the book are really doing. I... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This book is a treasure chest of smiles for the reader, all the fun types of smiles…broad, subtle, ironic, wistful, melancholy, and more! The images embrace the reader’s psyche with comfort and humor, warmth and song, humanity and the sense of being human. The images are stunning and well composed... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Wow. There is a lot to like about Kevin Cooley’s The Wizard of Awe. A happy marriage of book design, storytelling, and photography, it elevates the photobook conversation to a level higher than anything I have seen in a long time. For starters the cover is spectacular. It shows falling... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 