The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Hans Hickerson · Yasuyuki Takagi photographs urban neglect and decay but also renewal in Brooklyn Lot Recordings. The book is a catalog of what he saw in empty lots in Brooklyn, New York between 1995 and 2005, and his photographs present the detritus of modern life accumulating in vacant spaces behind and between... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Photographers and painters have long grappled with the representation of time. Photographer Ulf Lundin, in his photo book Best of Sweden, cleverly incorporates time in his composited landscape images. He does so by capturing multiple events and changes in light across a single Swedish landscape over one day, working these... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega · Lycien-David Cséry’s Cracks and Dents is a meditation on imperfection, but it’s also a study in abstraction—one that draws as much from the language of painting as it does from photography. Taken between 2016 and 2018, the images document the dents, rust, and impromptu repairs found on the surfaces of... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · With recent social-political events in the United States, I felt it was overdue to review Céline Clanet Photolucida book award, Máze, published in 2009. Clanet’s subject are the individuals and landscape of Norway’s Lapland, a culture that spans four countries far above the Artic Circle, and specifically the Sámi village of... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian Arnold · Michael Radford’s and Massimo Troisi’s 1994 film, Il Postino (The Postman) tells the story of an Italian mail carrier named Mario, a peasant on a small island of Italy. He befriends the famed Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. The elder poet is exiled from his homeland for political dissent. Mario, disgruntled... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • This charming book is a time capsule, Hickerson’s pictorial coming-of-age story. Hickerson hit the trifecta of a learning experience…he loved studying the culture and language of the French, he was studying & living in France, and he was forward looking enough to be taking images of that year. Most of us... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · Social scientists distinguish between space and place. Space is a location defined by size, distance, and boundaries. Place, on the other hand, is about the social characteristics of these physical locations. Places contain meanings that are derived from the people, social practices, and cultures that comprise them. Meaning becomes emplaced... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · You can’t thumb through some photobooks. You have to look at them front to back and read the texts, otherwise they don’t work. Jordan Baumgarten’s Family Tree Removal is like that. If you don’t read the text, you don’t understand what the pictures and the book are really doing. I... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian O’Neill · Stephen Voss is a photojournalist. You may have seen his work and portraits in Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post Magazine, and more. As a critic and collector of photobooks, I have a few books by photojournalists on my shelves. Perhaps you do too. They often follow a familiar format of,... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · A time, a place, and a point of view all meet in a photograph. The time and place can be obvious, but the point of view part can get complicated, as it involves technical, artistic, and personal considerations that are in turn themselves the product of times and places. The... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 