Articles

Gerhard Clausing reviews João Linneu's first monograph, a 416-page record of his partner Fernanda Fajardo's difficult pregnancy and the premature birth of their son Valentín in 2014. The title carries the family's initials; Valentín, now eleven, drew the figure on the spine. Clausing finds that Linneu refuses idealized maternity imagery, pairing tired, bed-bound portraits with São Paulo's concrete towers, grids, blank pages and sudden red interruptions, and notes that photography was barred from the intensive care unit. He reads the book as a shared act of seeing, with Fajardo contributing self-portraits, and praises its quiet honesty. Read Article

Hans Hickerson reviews Eugene Richards’s New World, a photobook of 56 black-and-white photographs from the North Dakota plains paired with Charles Bowden texts drawn from his memoir Dakotah. Hickerson describes the sequence moving from open prairie and signs of human presence to abandoned interiors, dead birds and insects, dolls, and family relics, with almost no contemporary people. He reads the book as less about a specific place than about endurance, loss, hope, despair, decay, and death. He argues that Richards is not practicing photojournalism here but pursuing something deeper and more personal, and he calls the result an impressive, accomplished marriage of image and text. Read Article

Brian F. O’Neill reviews Arturo Soto’s 2025 photobook Border Documents, an image-text work that combines monochrome street photographs with family history. O’Neill describes Soto’s approach as blending documentary photography and cultural geography, moving between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez without sensationalizing the border. The reviewer praises the book’s sequencing, small passport-like format, layflat binding and Rob van Hoesel’s design, especially the cover’s stencil gaps. He argues that Soto’s precise, eye-level images and his father’s recollections create a restrained, personal account of place, memory and time, challenging media stereotypes while tracing everyday life across physical and legal barriers. Read Article

In this review, Brian O’Neill considers Nora Bibel’s 2024 monograph Uncertain Homelands, which examines climate change across Indonesia, Namibia and Germany. He describes Bibel’s combination of drone landscapes, environmental portraits, GPS coordinates, interviews and historical scientific texts as a rigorous, multi-modal approach that links lived experience to climate discourse. O’Neill finds the interviews especially effective and argues that the book expands what a climate-change photobook can do. He also notes that the rationale for the three sites remains somewhat opaque and that the German–Namibian colonial relationship is not fully unpacked, while still crediting the project’s documentary precision and design. Read Article

Lee Halvorsen reviews Byron Smith’s Testament ’22, made during the photographer’s months in Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Halvorsen reads the mostly black-and-white sequence as repeated movement between ordinary life and violent disruption, rather than a chronological record. Couples, celebrations and moments of companionship alternate with grief, damaged places and the consequences of combat. The reviewer emphasizes the photographs’ sensory force and the persistence of hope and solidarity. He also discusses Igor Kossov’s accompanying essay and finds that the book’s journal-like form encourages reflection on the human experience behind the events. Read Article

Matt Schneider reviews Daniel Chatard’s Niemandsland as both a photographic project and an account of history, politics and loss in Germany’s Rhineland. He focuses on maps dated 1997–2023 that trace expanding coal mines, displaced villages, a shrinking forest and rising temperatures. Schneider describes how photographs, field notes, archival material and correspondence connect environmental destruction with individual lives. His reading attends to the demolition of a community church, departures from longstanding homes and continuing resistance. He finds an overall trajectory of loss, while emphasizing that Chatard’s concluding images also convey anger, persistence and hope amid divided communities. Read Article

Hans Hickerson reviews Kevin Cooley’s The Wizard of Awe as a compelling combination of photography, book design and storytelling. He follows its four-part account of pyrotechnician Ken Miller, from his Minnesota workshop and displays to his prosecution and imprisonment. Hickerson examines how coloured papers, official reports, evidence photographs and Miller’s own words build a narrative alongside Cooley’s portraits and nighttime explosions. He finds the editing and sequencing disciplined, and describes smoke images that suggest paintings, distant galaxies or imaginary creatures. His enthusiasm for the visual spectacle is accompanied by a reading of Miller’s experience as a personal tragedy. Read Article

In this review, Hans Hickerson considers John Volynchook’s photobook Faultlines, published by GOST with text by Helen Baczkowska. Hickerson describes 48 black-and-white nature photographs that, viewed alone, appear timeless and geographically vague, apart from subtle traces of human activity. He argues that the book’s context—fracking surveys and gas-production proposals in the United Kingdom, with letter-and-number titles—reframes the landscapes as beauty treated as commodity and under threat. Hickerson praises the printing and tonal range, notes seasonal and water-focused images, and reads the title as referring to geology, social conflict, and possibly culpability. He presents the book as an invitation to slow looking and reflection. Read Article

Hans Hickerson reviews Hannah Modigh’s Searching for Sivagami as a photobook shaped by childhood memory and the search for a former caregiver in South India. He argues that its photographs of women, domestic details and local landscapes gain meaning through the accompanying texts and editorial sequence. Hickerson discusses the muted printing, varied pacing, family photographs and accordion binding as parts of that experience. He notes that the afterword suggests Modigh found Sivagami, while the identities pictured and the encounter’s outcome remain indistinct. His reading emphasizes relationships between women and the difficulty of reaching back into the past. Read Article

In this review, Brian Arnold considers Yan Wang Preston’s photobook a layered, multidisciplinary project linking colonialism, botany, and personal identity. Arnold describes how Preston photographed a heart-shaped rhododendron cluster every other day for a year near Burnley, then expanded the work with trail cameras, vintage postcards, dissected plant studies, audio, and ten commissioned essays. He notes that the book’s seasonal sections juxtapose daily repetition with changing details. Arnold reads Preston’s reflections on being a Chinese immigrant in England alongside the plant’s labeling as non-native and invasive, arguing that the book draws an evocative, sometimes painful parallel between the photographer’s life and the shrub’s contested place. The reviewer finds the result compelling. Read Article

Gerhard Clausing reviews Thomas Hoepker’s DDR / East Germany – Colour Works 1972–1990 as an exercise in patient observation. He focuses on how Kodachrome colour, geometric compositions and small gestures reveal relationships between ordinary life and official ideology. Clausing describes recurring scenes, restrained sequencing and the placement of people beneath slogans as encouraging close attention rather than dramatic conclusions. He also considers the perspectives supplied by Wolf Biermann’s essay and Thomas Gust’s afterword. His review argues that the book’s political and emotional force emerges through visual detail, presenting documentary photography as a means of recognizing complexity without spectacle. Read Article

Brian F. O’Neill reviews Ayda Gragossian’s North North South, a sequence of 52 monochrome photographs made in Los Angeles between 2019 and 2023. He argues that its back streets, dwellings, cars and empty chairs convey the city’s atmosphere without relying on landmarks or glamour. O’Neill reads the quiet but unsettling images in relation to the pandemic and political change during their making. His account follows the sequence from damaged windows and neglected spaces toward a final glimpse through a fence, interpreting that opening as a restrained possibility of renewal. The review emphasizes perception, recurring motifs and the book’s carefully shaped progression. Read Article