The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Olga Bubich · Atlantic is a new photobook by the Ukraine-born photographer, curator, and publisher Dimitri Bogachuk, whose delicate work and attentive eye for seascapes have established him as a distinctive voice in contemporary art photography. Formally, the collection can be seen as the extension of the artist’s previous volume entitled Le Plat... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · A contemporary trend in photobooks is to be clever and mix in various and sundry subjects in an attempt to add meaning and depth. Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t and just comes across as empty attention seeking. Artists who share meaningful issues stand out. Usually it is because... Continue Reading →
Review by Olga Bubich · Sometimes what draws a collector towards a photobook is a name – that of a photographer whose eye and voice one trusts, a designer whose choices one allows to curate personal collections, or a small independent publisher whose selectiveness, often conditioned by financial limitations, makes each of their projects immediately... Continue Reading →
Photo essay and synopsis by Brian O’Neill · Printed Matter Inc. was established in New York in the 1980s in response to the growing interest surrounding artist books, zines, and artist driven publications. Their art book fairs have now become must-do destinations for art publishers, collectors, and enthusiasts. The inaugural fair in New York was... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Less can definitely be more. Vladyslav Krasnoshchok’s Documentation of the War, for example, views like visual grunge rock – sound stripped down to its core. Like other successful photobooks it is a happy partnership of photography, texts, and design. How to describe Krasnoshchok’s photographs? Adjectives like bleak, dark, raw, primal,... Continue Reading →
Review by Hans Hickerson · Move over Barbie and Ken. Make way for Ken and Grant, the homonormative protagonists of Matthew Finley’s An Impossibly Normal Life, a script-flipping fantasy that views the world through a gay lens. The book is an imagined photo album that doesn’t talk about sexual orientation. Instead, it embodies queerness by... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • How well do we know our extended family? How would we connect with our family’s history? What was important to them; their hopes and dreams? What can we truly understand about them if they are no longer able to provide the answers to our many questions? If even a little... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Brooke DiDonato’s Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer subverts everyday life quietly from within. The photographs infiltrate our reality, introducing small impossibilities, spatial contradictions, and bodily misalignments that accumulate into a sustained, disorienting logic, characterizing a topsy-turvy world through a certain amount of disturbance, which in turn invites contemplation.... Continue Reading →
Review by Olga Bubich Spilt Milk is a debut photobook by American photographer, teacher, and photo editor Andrea Birnbaum. As its title suggests, the themes it addresses belong to the intimate sphere of regret: actions taken and responses withheld, things done, planned, postponed, overlooked, or deliberately ignored – in other words, the emotional baggage one... Continue Reading →
Review by Matt Schneider · “Inhabitants of the industrialized world have become hunter-gatherers of material goods—we seek, we find, we acquire. Our possessions reveal who we are and tell stories of our aspirations, our nostalgia, our past; each piece is a fragment of the identity we wish to project or preserve.” - David Ricci (p.... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 