The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • Around 2006, San Francisco photographer Alan Ostreicher got a simple idea: Why not document life in his apartment? It would be a personal project, not necessarily intended for anyone beyond him and his wife. Who else would want to capture such mundane subject matter anyway? Jump ahead to the pandemic of... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • One of the few things – perhaps the only thing – I remember from high school chemistry is the teacher referring to water as “the universal solvent.” That concept or image has stuck with me, the idea that if left in water long enough, everything will dissolve, fade away, disappear.... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Matt Shallenberger’s photobook The Leaping Place is a mashup of family history, overlaid with a visual investigation of Hawaiian mythology. He utilizes the Hawaiian mythology of Kumulipo, a long chant of creation, as the foundation for his own creation quest, using translations of this long chant to help guide him in... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Escape is on the minds of many people these days, now that we are in various stages of “Stay at Home” efforts to reduce the spread of a global pandemic. As warmer weather approaches, fantasies of trips to the beach have been curtailed by a reality that few could have... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • It’s more than a little unsettling to characterize a book which can be described - in the words of its creator - as a “succession of dark days” as lovely. But that’s the first word that comes to mind in looking through Fabio Ponzio’s East of Nowhere. There is a... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Bodie, that 19th-century gold rush ghost town in the California hills east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, has been a theme park for photographers for years. Everyone from Ansel Adams down to Mom, Dad, and the kids with their point-and-shoots has captured the picturesque “arrested decay” of what is now... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • German photographer Florian Schwarz takes on the entire universe in his new book A Handful of Dust. Schwarz spent four years traveling to observatories in some of the most remote places on Earth. These observatories, operated by the Las Cumbres Observatory Foundation (LOC) in Santa Barbara, span the globe to allow... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • In Melissa Borman’s self-published book, A Piece of Dust in the Great Sea of Matter, she captures her subjects being actively engaged with the natural landscape as a metaphor for the elements of life. A Piece of Dust, a component of her book’s title, is to place a focus on... 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 →
