Review by Matt Schneider · If you have a car accident and you’re seriously injured – your left leg is broken, your right arm, nose broken, head broken, who knows what – then they put you in intensive care and everyone can see that you’re in a real mess. But if one day you break... Continue Reading →
Harry Gruyaert – Homeland
Review by Melanie Chapman · In this social media saturated era we live in, it seems impossible to escape the vertical visual plague that is filter-enhanced influencers posing and pouting for selfies. Thus, it is a genuinely wonder-filled experience to be in the presence of another fine publication of Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert’s sublime images.... Continue Reading →
Cornelia Suhan – Silent Witness
Review by Steve Harp · In 1975 Martha Rosler exhibited a group of 24 diptychs titled “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.” The work juxtaposes banal images (think of Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations) of rundown facades in New York’s Bowery district with text panels listing euphemisms for inebriated states (“blind drunk,” “dead drunk,” “embalmed,” “buried,” “gone”). The... Continue Reading →
David Paul Bayles – Sap in Their Veins
Review by Hans Hickerson ∙ Sap in Their Veins offers portraits of loggers as well as their personal narratives. Photographer David Paul Bayles was able to document loggers as an insider, as he himself spent four seasons working in the woods with logging crews. Looking at and reading the book we develop a better understanding... Continue Reading →
Teri Vershel – Relative Strangers
Review by Lee Halvorsen • The individual street images in Perfect Strangers are delightful and bursting with the emotion and environmental texture of the moment. Teri Vershel connected with people and places so candidly I felt as if I were looking through the camera’s viewfinder with her. In his foreword for the book, Sam Abell called her images... Continue Reading →
Six PhotoBook Journal Reviews Featured on Thinking About Photography
We are very pleased that six reviews dealing with photography and resistance are featured as a part of Ann Mitchell’s Winter Showcase, THINKING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY, just published: https://www.thinkingaboutphotography.com/photobook-resistance Mitchell writes, "the photographers in this showcase are giving voice to those who have been silenced. They celebrate lives and cultures that persist despite outside forces to... Continue Reading →
Pryor Dodge – YLLA: The Birth of Modern Animal Photography
Review by Gerhard Clausing • All you have to do is watch “Gorilla Videos” on Facebook to recognize that some animals are very similar to us. And that is not really a case of anthropomorphism, which can be defined as attributing human characteristics to other creatures. But assigning animals to a lower class and denying... Continue Reading →
Holly Roussell, Editor – Mo Yi: Selected Photographs 1988-2003
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Mo Yi is an interesting Chinese photographer of Tibetan origin. He has had only a few major exhibitions in the West; this photobook and the related exhibitions (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art and Arles Photography Festival) are a welcome change. His work encompasses several decades of experimenting with images of... Continue Reading →
Peter van Agtmael – Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home
Review by Gerhard Clausing • There are a number of reviews of photobooks about warfare that I have reviewed over the years. You can enter war in the search box and look at as many of them as you like. But none of them are as comprehensive, as complex, and as personal as this one,... Continue Reading →
Robert Gumpert – Division Street
Review by Melanie Chapman • As the old saying goes, “Home is where your heart is.” Epic poems and countless songs have been written on the topic; missing home, coming home, longing for home... “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”, “Home on the Range”, “There’s No Place like Home”... but what if you have no home? What if... Continue Reading →