The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Ed Kashi’s new photobook, A Period in Time, feels like both a personal diary and a sweeping portrait of our shared world. It gathers images from his more than 45 years as a photojournalist into one powerful collection that is as emotional as it is informative. This compendium is more... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible – Maya Angelou I am captivated by a photobook’s cover in which it seems to offer two truths, especially when both appear correct. So it is for me with Michele Zousmer’s MIS[S]UNDERSTOOD, a photo-documentary that “explores... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • If we compare the planet with a communal apartment, we occupy the direst room. - Aleksei Yablokov, Environmental Advisor to Boris Yeltsin The Russian Urals is the subject of Alan Gignoux’s recent artist-photobook, Russian Rustbelt, documenting the Ural industrial region during a residency with the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg in... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When two gifted photographers bounce ideas for personal assignments off of each other in a free-floating way, the results can sizzle. This is the situation we have in the present project. Anna Strand and Helga Härenstam gave each other nine different assignments each, to the tune of “Do something about... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The work of Anastasia Samoylova, as shown in this first photobook retrospective and also in an exhibition at the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 11, 2025) was a delightful discovery for me. Not only does she create landscapes and other scapes that have meaning and a certain timelessness,... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 Gerhard Clausing • Scot Sothern is a very innovative photographer. For this project he decided to mingle with the Hollywood Boulevard people, assuming the guise and behavior of a street person. As people passed by, he yelled “Hey, look at me!” and snapped their pictures with a disposable film camera with flash. A... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Katherine Longly and Cécile Hupin have created a conceptual photojournalistic project; a series of interviews, quotes, screen grabs and reuse of photographs, repurposed to create a narrative that asks the question: If money cannot buy happiness, what drives people to participate in a lottery? The book is design and sequenced in... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The most extraordinary photobooks are those that have a grip on you and become very personal as you spend more time with them. Henry Schulz’s book is precisely that kind of a project. In 61 images he presents assemblages of human elements that cut through time and space. Even though... Continue Reading →
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