The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Wayne Swanson • Arab Spring. The Mexican-U.S. border crises. Ongoing strife in Africa. And now the exodus from Ukraine to escape the Russian assault. What to do with all these refugees? Germany, in the wake of the wave of emigration caused by Arab Spring uprisings in 2015, emerged as a beacon of hope by... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • The mystery that is India, “where you can touch what is most essential, where life and death are always side-by-side.” This is the subject of the new photobook by renowned colorist Harry Gruyaert, representing a dozen trips made over the span of forty years. In his introduction, Magnum photographer Gruyaert reflects on... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • As I looked through Ara Oshagan’s 2021 monograph displaced, for some odd reason I was reminded of James Agee’s 1941 study of tenant farming in the American south, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. There is a surface level of similarity in that both books are, in a sense “documentary” - considerations of the lives of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The hills and hollers along the Appalachian Mountains running down the eastern United States are steeped in folklore and folkways. In From Yonder Wooded Hill, photographer Riley Goodman spins a narrative tale from his experiences there and the stories he heard growing. Drawing from his own photos, archival images, short passages of text and poetry,... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill • The origin of the term mise-en-scène, while it is now most commonly used within media and cinema studies, is attributed to the French writer Alexandre Dumas. Dumas financed and helped design his Château de Monte-Cristo in Port-Marly, France on the outer suburban fringe of Paris, and in so doing named it... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • While we at PhotoBook Journal tend to defer from broad thematic photobooks with a multitude of contributors, and in general the illustrated catalogs for exhibitions usually have little design and layout merit. I take exception with the recent exhibition publication in conjunction with Harvard Art Museums being very worth investigating. The exhibition and... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill • Fish Story, the last major project/publication by Southern California based photographer, filmmaker, critic, teacher, and theorist Allan Sekula was originally released coincident with a touring exhibition that began in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 1995 and concluded in Kassel, Germany in 2002. In June of 2018, it was re-released by London headquartered... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Brian Rose is a commercial architectural photographer who on occasion is intrigued by the self-inflictions that seem to dog an ex-American president. In Rose’s previously monograph, Atlantic City, as Melanie Chapman writes in her book review, Rose documents the ex-president’s bankrupt New Jersey casino as a “failed attempt to dress up a... Continue Reading →
Slipcover, George Tice: Lifework Review by Douglas Stockdale • One of my first photobook acquisitions is another retrospective by George Tice – Photographs 1953-1973, which was then a twenty-year retrospective. Now that I am a bit older and perhaps wiser, I am understanding why this earlier book was published when noting that the introduction is by the... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When a photographer’s viewpoint and methodology are totally in tune with the subject matter and with the tenor of the times, we have a degree of synchronicity that makes the viewer’s experience unforgettable. Such is the case with Simon Vansteenwinckel’s Wuhan Radiography. The first thing we notice when we receive... Continue Reading →
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