The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Brian Rose · During the 2020 pandemic, Bethany Jacobson escaped the confines of her apartment and took to the winding paths of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. For those of us in New York, the whoops and wails of sirens seemed never to cease, a constant reminder of the presence of disease and death in... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Memories came flooding back to me as I paged through Todd Hido’s 2023 photobook The End Sends Advance Warning. When I was growing up in the upper Midwest, there were moments of a winter’s evening when the combination of cold, clouds, a blurry sun and the stillness of open spaces produced a... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • As the old saying goes, “Home is where your heart is.” Epic poems and countless songs have been written on the topic; missing home, coming home, longing for home... “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”, “Home on the Range”, “There’s No Place like Home”... but what if you have no home? What if... Continue Reading →
Review by Lee Halvorsen • Lisa McCord’s “Rotan Switch” is a superb synthesis of content, design, and emotion…more than a story, more than photos, more than a book, it’s an experience. The design is unique and subtly compelling. At first look, the white space, the seemingly random text blocks, and the image arrangement didn’t click... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Let us all give thanks to Harry Gruyaert for his cones and rods. He shares his sight so that we may see his good works, and thus help us appreciate our planet as a vast and ceaselessly magical place. How fortunate are we as lovers of photographic images that octogenarian Harry... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Whose land is it? This is probably the underlying question for Lana Z Caplan’s photodocumentary project of an expansive region of coastal California, which also represents a broader question for all of North America and the world beyond. Her specific subject is an area generally identified as Oceano, located on the... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp · Due Occhi, the title of Johannes Groht’s new monograph, can be translated from Italian as “two eyes.” Before considering some of the associations triggered (to use Groht’s term from the artist’s insert included in the review copy), we might first pause to consider the “newness” of the book. Published in 2020, the book (again... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale · The COVID-19 pandemic turned our normal accustomed social interactions on its head and had a huge impact on our global society. In conjunction with the resulting medical misery, many governments implemented home quarantine as a means to limit the spread of this highly contagious virus. It’s one thing to leave and... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • The book cover for Christian Kasners recently released photographic book, Woodward, has an interesting graphic design, printed full bleed. The repetitive pattern stirs the memory until it is apparent that this is a tire tread pattern, a subtext for the location of Kasners photo-documentary of Woodward Avenue, one of the main urban... Continue Reading →
Review by Paul Anderson • Since 1997 Thomas Kellner has been exploring the artistic possibilities of the photographic film contact sheet, turning the grid structure of the sheet into his artistic playground. He designs and sequences the contact sheet frames in order to build dancing deconstructions of a larger scene. His prior deconstructions have included... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 