The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • Toshio Shibata likes to blur boundaries. Between the natural and the human-made. Between the representational and the abstract. Between photography and drawing. Shibata, one of Japan's preeminent landscape photographers, has focused his attention since the early 1980s on the intersection of nature and infrastructure, finding art in scenes of bridges, dams,... Continue Reading →
Review by Darin Boville • Redmond O'Hanlon's basic writing strategy is to put himself in some remote and dangerous place and to write about how he overcame obstacle after obstacle to his very survival and found his way back. This is a strategy that will be familiar to many artists. Bill Bryson thinks the world of... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • War, conflict and then its aftermath can create terrible consequences for man-kind. But what if what occurs afterward is benign and seemingly without any drama? Could this justify the conflict or afford one the opportunity to ignore or look away? This appears to be the indirect question raised by Emanuel Cederqvist’s... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Timing is everything, as is perspective. This is true in photography as well as in life. Recently, the imposingly large statue of Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who represented the racist past of the American south, was finally dismantled in just over an hour, after having dominated a residential... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • It may not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Duane Michals extensive photographic career spanning 50+ years that he is visual storyteller with a wicked sense of humor. His latest photobook of visual puns, The Idiots Delight - Plaisirs Ridicules, is a brilliant concept and complemented by an... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Some artists are of their time. Others, like Swiss photographer René Groebli, transcend time. From the 1940s through the new millennium, he assembled a diverse and innovative body of work, often at odds with the conventions and expectations of the moment. The Magic Eye is the first retrospective look at the... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • I have long found the images of Vera Lutter among the most challenging and thought-provoking in contemporary photography. Lutter’s work is that rare combination of visually beautiful (sublime would be a better word), conceptually challenging (“good to think with,” to use Claude Levi-Strauss’ phrase) and continually surprising (perhaps odd, given the... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • Each photograph in Christian Michael Filardo’s Gerontion is a puzzle, a mystery, an enigma. Gerontion takes its title from a poem of the same name by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1920. The poem is the monologue by an elderly (“gerontic”) man expressing his thoughts on Europe after the First World... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 11th issue • Happy Valentine’s month, and here are some of the books we love. We have another diverse photobook edition for your enjoyment. We welcome Lodoe-Laura Haines-Wangda as a guest contributor who reviewed Zora Murff’s photobook, which was selected as the winner of the Independently Published category for the Lucie Foundation... Continue Reading →
photo l.a. (Photo credit: Debe Arlook) By Douglas Stockdale & Debe Arlook • More than 10,000 people attended photo l.a., which was held January 30–February 2, 2020, at the Barker Hangar (Santa Monica Airport) in Santa Monica, California. The opening reception that about 3,000 attended was on Thursday evening, January 30th. The annual photographic exhibition... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 