The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
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 →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Lynn Alleva Lilley’s photobook The Nest rewards careful as well as casual looking. A finely observed and lovingly chronicled portrait of the woods near her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 98 photographs it builds up overlapping layers of detail, form, relationship, and metaphorical resonance. Like the photographs of other artists who... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • If Toulouse-Lautrec and Martin Parr had a baby, its name would be Casinoland: Tired of Winning. A dynamic collection of new color photographs by Michael Rababy, this publication from Kehrer Verlag focuses our gaze on the denizens of casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and other illustrious locales, and offers such... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Rose · During the 2020 pandemic, Bethany Jacobson escaped the confines of her apartment and took to the winding paths of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. For those of us in New York, the whoops and wails of sirens seemed never to cease, a constant reminder of the presence of disease and death in... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Memories came flooding back to me as I paged through Todd Hido’s 2023 photobook The End Sends Advance Warning. When I was growing up in the upper Midwest, there were moments of a winter’s evening when the combination of cold, clouds, a blurry sun and the stillness of open spaces produced a... Continue Reading →
By Douglas Stockdale, portraits by Donna Cosentino • I just received notice of the recent passing of Wayne Swanson (1951 – 2024) on Wednesday, June 5th, 2024 after a protracted illness. Wayne was a very talented photobook reviewer, a friend and a Contributing Editor of PhotoBook Journal (2019 - 2024), whose legacy with us includes 70 succinct... Continue Reading →
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 →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Lisa McCord’s “Rotan Switch” is a superb synthesis of content, design, and emotion…more than a story, more than photos, more than a book, it’s an experience. The design is unique and subtly compelling. At first look, the white space, the seemingly random text blocks, and the image arrangement didn’t click... Continue Reading →
Review by Debe Arlook • The Meaning of Gravity is the first endeavor by Luhz Press, an independent art book publisher based in Los Angeles. Helmed by Zoe Lemelson, it is also the first monograph of the late Ken Graves’ mixed-media collage. Graves (1942-2016) is a 2000 Guggenheim Fellow well known for his street photography and books from the 1960s -1970s.... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 