Reviews

How important is an actual story to a photobook? By story here I mean almost literal narrative, with characters and situations: a mini-movie or…

Ango Daido is the first really successful combination of photos and short stories in the series of photobooks made by designer Satoshi Machiguchi and…

Nobuyoshi Araki doesn’t need me to write about him. He probably doesn’t need anybody to write about him at this point, five hundred or…

“I wonder where he’s gone? He went out on his motorbike and hasn’t been back since”   This moving new book from Japan, The…

In 2013 one of the most beautiful photo books that I have ever seen was released. The majestic Grays the Mountain Sends by Bryan Schutmaat. A study…

First comes the hunger. An actual physical urgency to make pictures. I feel it all the time, especially if I haven’t been out shooting…

Over the last few years I have been delighted to see the appearance of some fine work emerging from the Philippines, and about time…

Here’s the one time I met Saul Leiter. It was a couple years before his death, he was signing a new book at his…

Although regularly listed as one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, we – the UK –  along with most other “first world” countries are…

There’s a very helpful quote on the back of the reissue (finally!) of Christer Strömholm’s 1967 masterpiece, Poste Restante, from a contemporary review in…

In 2013 Amani Willett released Disquiet, one of the most beautiful books of that year. A sequence of images that contrasted the first years…

In my fiction writing class, after a piece has been read out loud, the first question we ask is: What’s the story? I like…

“Manila is a shit hole….and you’re going to love it !” Well, it got my attention. Brian Sergio is a name that is going…

The first time I met Daido Moriyama, I told him I thought of him as the Bob Dylan of photography. A small smile, an…

The Angry Bat is a publication house run by Matej Sitar, photographer himself, with a very slow rhythm of publication, more or less one…

I became aware of Tiane Doan Na Champassak pretty much from the time his books started to appear. His work instantly stood out as fresh and interesting…

Fun times! In this review, I’m looking at books from my own growing-up world, the celebrated/ridiculed San Fernando Valley suburbs north of Los Angeles/Beverly…

Books of landscape photography are tricky things.  How do you present what is very often flawlessly beautiful, but somehow clichéd subject matter in such a way…

True story: I was twenty, on a beach in San Diego, California, reading Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s sprawling God/devil-bedizened tale of Ahab’s obsession with his…

Imagine: There’s a novel that towers over all of 19th-century American literature, there’s a group of French poems that takes you where no other…

Most of us have experienced what happens when we, for instance, are about to buy a car: you see cars everywhere; all you see…

Perhaps it’s because I’m a novelist, because I studied lit in college, but what moves me most in a potentially great photobook is what…

Ending by Leif Sandberg is not an easy book. It is not supposed to be. It is a powerful, cathartic work of raw honesty and…

One of the rarest, most interesting of photobook genres: I’m a talented young photographer, I’m doing wild, socially deviant stuff, throwing myself all the…

At first glance it is likely that very few people will be upset by this book….but look a little closer, and it very quickly becomes apparent that…

In our bedroom there´s a photograph of my wife´s grandparents house, an aerial view from Hälsingland, on the east coast, in the middle of…

Daido Moriyama’s book “Pantomime” arrives with the mail, as usual accompanied by a Japanese whiff of fragrant ink (Swedish-produced photobooks do not smell because…

Photographer Shane Lavalette had the good fortune (and as we’ll see, the tough climb) to be commissioned by the High Museum of Art in…

We open the new book 36 Views, by Russian photographer Fyodor Telkov and published by Ediciones Anómalas, to find a shot of a Soviet…

New York in the late 1970’s was a place of utter exoticism to a European. A frigid, snow covered tundra in the winter, come…