The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Douglas Stockdale • I believe a photobook based on a body of work that explores the nude form has some high esthetical and contemporary hurdles to overcome; a genre of art that predates photography itself. The nude and semi-nude, both male and female, are frequently subjects for photographers for a wide variety of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • So often, suburbia is portrayed as a bland and vacuous place — tract homes, franchise convenience stores, and a lot of sullen youth. That’s not the way Australian photographer Bill Henson sees it. Through Henson’s lens, suburbia is a dreamscape filled with dark shadows, fluffy clouds, Egyptian ruins, teenage angst, pastoral... Continue Reading →
Review by Madhu Joseph John • They say that the American South is a land in transition what with the incursions of globalization and the migrations of diverse populations. Some of us might be familiar with images of the “new South” depicted by artists such as Eugene Richards, Mitch Epstein, Tommy Kha and Shane Lavalette. Perhaps... Continue Reading →
Review by Lodoe-Laura Haines-Wangda • The first image in Zora Murff’s photobook At No Point In Between is actually just half an image; a tiny loose color print, six-centimeters tall, tucked in between the pages. In the fragment, Walter Scott is running, but he is separated from what he is running from. In Slow Violence and... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Ah, the glorious 1980s – an era that still featured iconic photographs on LP album covers and inner sleeves and fabulous musicians portrayed in those images. Since then, vinyl has achieved a resurgence, and many of the musicians are still around, and others have certainly not been forgotten … What... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • What initially struck me in reading Kevin Bubriski’s latest photobook, Mustang in Black and White, was the pictorial framing and sequential interweaving of the landscape and portraits photographs of Nepal. In a turn-about, this colorful region is illustrated using higher contrast black and white photographs that border on abstraction. As... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Now playing at a bookstore near you is a behind-the-scenes look at the spectacle of moviemaking, filmed in epic widescreen black and white. Jeff Bridges: Pictures, Volume Two, by an accomplished photographer who also happens to be an actor of some acclaim, is a welcome sequel to Bridges’ 2003 book about... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In 1992 an intriguing book with the title The Reconfigured Eye was published by MIT Press. In our current age of “fakery,” and especially in hindsight, the subtitle of that book is even more intriguing: “Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era.” The point of that book was that the digital... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Considering that photographer Rohina Hoffman’s day job is as a neurologist studying what goes on in a person’s mind, it should come as no surprise that her first monograph she would focus on what comes out of a person’s head. Specifically, what grows out of a person’s scalp, and how... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This ambitious project by Madhu Joseph John raises some challenging questions: Who are we, and where does our journey take us? Are our differences in appearance, age, location, preferences and our levels of experience really so important that we will allow them to be used as a basis for dividing... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 