The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Douglas Stockdale • This book is part retrospective with an autobiography about the early phase of Neil Folberg’s long photographic career, and part portfolio for early unpublished body of work. As an interesting combination of biography and portfolio, it is front-loaded with his personal reflections on his career change to photography while studying at... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The classic 20th-century typologies of basic building types by Bernd and Hilla Becher are a hard act to follow. But Thomas Kellner puts a 21st-century spin on them in this monograph with the mouthful title Fachwerkhäuser des Siegener Industriegebietes heute (half-timbered houses of the Siegen industrial area today). From the late 1950s to... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • I find surreal one of the most consistently misused of words, not only in art contexts but in general usage as well. Most often the speaker will mean visually fantastic or simply unbelievable. However, this is far from the concept of “surrealism” as offered by Andre Breton in his manifestos. For Breton, surreal meant... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Looking at the photographs of Jordi Barreras’s photobook, Already But Not Yet, one might mistakenly think that his project was created during the COVID pandemic revealing singular individuals in a vacant megalopolis. Only after close inspection and noting the missing masks, which is a hint, that this is probably not true. This... Continue Reading →
Front Cover, Blue Bar Rear cover, Blue Bar Review by Douglas Stockdale • The humidity and occasional fog derived by the proximity of a river can create beautifully dreamlike conditions or provide a mysterious backdrop for a creepy event. Between these these two polar opposites is a low-contrast environment that elicits a kind of gloominess,... Continue Reading →
Review by Debe Arlook • “I love to return to spaces I have already photographed. To see how they change through time. A new crack in the road, a dried bush in the distance…like us, the landscape also changes.” Dino Kužnik’s quote, along with the pastel-pink, card-wraparound cover printed with D I N O, one... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Ahh, typologies. So often prosaic as individual images, yet so powerful when presented as a group. French architects Caroline and Cyril Desroche take the idea to an extreme in Los Angeles Standards, with 1300 photos broken down into 15 typologies to classify the elements that visually define the city. Although a sprawling... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • Among the many poetically posed, yet ambiguously explained, concepts found in the writings of the German essayist and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, one of the most provocative is that of the “optical unconscious.” Introduced in his 1931 essay “A Small History of Photography,” Benjamin compares photography “with its devices of... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Three street photographers and their three unique perspectives and shared interests; they came together in 2019 at the International Video Art Festival of Camagüey and this photographic book project resulted from that meeting and their time wandering the streets of Camagüey, a city on the island of Cuba. The book’s title, Camagüey, Camagüey, Camagüey subtlety... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • A densely packed urban environment can overwhelm the senses. The noisy buzz of activity, the jostling sea of humanity amidst a vast variety of aromas permeating the air. Can a single image effectively distill this urban chaos for a viewer? As an ardent street photographer, Ellen Friedlander found that one documentary style... Continue Reading →
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