The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · Yasuyuki Takagi photographs urban neglect and decay but also renewal in Brooklyn Lot Recordings. The book is a catalog of what he saw in empty lots in Brooklyn, New York between 1995 and 2005, and his photographs present the detritus of modern life accumulating in vacant spaces behind and between... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Photobooks are a great medium for telling stories, but also for re-creating emotional landscapes. Alex Blanco’s Meat, Fish, and Aubergine Caviar does both and also mixes in memories, cookbook recipes, and idealized fantasy. If this sounds like a lot it is because the book operates simultaneously on several levels, like... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · Imagine, if you will, a couple stripped down to their underwear, together leaning against a tree along a lakeside beach in Cheryomushki, Siberia. It’s hard to determine the variety of tree but it bends like it was designed to cradle the woman. The couple looks a little intoxicated, giving the... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • You’re in the eye of the storm…you’ve seen the chaos and change that just occurred and in the not-too-far distance, you see more coming. Through Gray’s images, this is the storm’s eye view of mankind’s interaction with the planet and the mostly uncertain nature of that contact. You're standing on the... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Context is everything, and without it you are lost. If you look at the 48 photographs in John Volynchook’s Faultlines by themselves, you would not know what country you were in, or even what century. They depict timeless views of nature, all except two photographs where you see tractor tire... Continue Reading →
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 →
PhotoBook Journal 