The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Rotkäppchen Românesc is a spellbinding photographic railroad journey in today’s Romania. Horst Klein made these images over several years as he traveled by train in wintertime Romania to remote and sometimes semi-abandoned train stations and train landscapes. These are not typical train photos but rather brief glimpses through the train windows... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · It is a good sign when you start looking at a book and cannot put it down. That is what happened to me with Luis Corzo’s photobook, Pasaco, 1996. Corzo uses photos and texts, in English and Spanish, to tell the story of his and his father’s kidnapping for ransom... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian O’Neill · Stephen Voss is a photojournalist. You may have seen his work and portraits in Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post Magazine, and more. As a critic and collector of photobooks, I have a few books by photojournalists on my shelves. Perhaps you do too. They often follow a familiar format of,... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian O’Neill · Climate change, and various aspects of it, from forest fires, to drought, to adaptive landscaping and technologies, as well as oil extraction, have become more and more common within the world of fine art and documentary photography. Often, photographic projects oriented around climate change take an approach to human stories... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • For many of us the circus is a special experience full of magic. Some of us have at times felt a longing to be part of such a group of itinerant individuals that create illusions and bring special feats into what for most of us was the rather humdrum existence... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • If we compare the planet with a communal apartment, we occupy the direst room. - Aleksei Yablokov, Environmental Advisor to Boris Yeltsin The Russian Urals is the subject of Alan Gignoux’s recent artist-photobook, Russian Rustbelt, documenting the Ural industrial region during a residency with the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg in... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Looking at Zach Callahan’s photobook Exhaust, the three words that occurred to me were simple, focused, and convincing. Let me explain the simple part first. There are 36 color photographs, one to a page spread. Ten or so are portraits where the subject is engaging the photographer directly, and in... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Photobooks never cease to surprise me. The book is a versatile medium that can become so many things. Belgian photographer Wouter Vanhees’ Against the Tide goes down its own path, and the best way I can describe it is to say that it reads like a film-noir-inspired storyboard for a... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Having reviewed Rian Dundon’s recent photobook Passenger, I was curious to see his other books. I managed to get my hands on Changsha (2012, 2017) documenting his years in China, in black and white, full of movement, and trending dark and impressionistic, but this review is about another of Dundon’s... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · It is amazing how fast we have put COVID behind us. It seems like light-years ago today, but we were still emerging from it only three years ago in July of 2022, the date of the last entry in Beth Galton’s photobook COVID Diary. COVID changed everything, but you can... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 