Thursday, April 12
reviewed by Faye Robson I first saw Lydia Panas' work from the Mark of Abel series when it was exhibited at Foley Gallery, New York, in early 2010. Back then, I remember thinking that the photographs ? muted group portraits, in which obscurely connected individuals stand before anonymous rural backdrops ? were engaging but hard to access...

Monday, April 9
reviewed by Antone Dolezal In a nation polarized by starkly different personal and cultural beliefs, it's hard to imagine that Christopher Churchill's monograph American Faith wouldn't have its own slanted perspective. The title alone conjures a notion of an America deeply enveloped in a veil of religious temperament...

Thursday, April 5
reviewed by Colin Pantall 'Billy was a crook. he would do anything to survive and he wasn't even a good bouncer...

Monday, April 2
reviewed by Adam Bell Timothy H. O'Sullivan occupies a complex and fascinating position with photographic history...

Wednesday, March 28
reviewed by Sarah Bradley In several years of working at used book shops, I amassed an intriguing collection of things that fell from the pages of discarded books - photographs, ticket stubs, letters, newspaper clippings, receipts, pressed flowers, among other oddities. Tucked away for safe keeping, these items are forgotten treasures, the discovery of which was always a special moment, an intimate view of the previous owner...

Thursday, March 22
reviewed by Tom Leininger I am not an expert on Norwegian Black Metal. This review will deal strictly with the book True Norwegian Black Metal, as I read and processed it over a number of days...

Monday, March 12
reviewed by Blake Andrews Mack Books has been on a roll lately. Christian Patterson's Redheaded Peckerwood topped many 2011 year-end lists. That book alone would be the feather in most publishers' caps.

Thursday, March 8
reviewed by Blake Andrews Ed Panar relishes the banal. With projects such as Walking Home -- photographs of houses passed while walking home -- and Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes -- a study of static everyday forms -- Panar operates in the everyday world right outside the door...

Monday, March 5
reviewed by George Slade Always remember that you haven't fully experienced a book until you open its jacket. Interior Relations is an outstanding example of this...

Thursday, March 1
reviewed by Daniel W. Coburn Kevin Erskine is not your average storm chaser. While a new generation of thrill seekers barrel down gravel roads in vans equipped with digital imaging equipment and the latest satellite technology, Erskine relies primarily on intuition and his large format film camera to document the fury that unfolds in the sky...

Monday, February 27
reviewed by Adam Bell Place has always played a central position within photography. If photographers or artists are lucky, they may find a place, or subject for that matter, that transforms their practice and informs the work they make throughout their lives...

Monday, February 20
reviewed by Colin Pantall 'The Altogether is inspired by manufacturing and the manual workers who make and produce, craftsman who are skilled and work with their hands,' says Chris Coekin of his latest journey through English working class culture.

Part of that craftsmanship is found in the book itself...

Thursday, February 16
reviewed by Karen Jenkins I must leave it to a different expert to say whether the car on the cover of Pontiac, with its solid body and custom wheels, is the namesake of this Michigan town and its now-defunct auto brand. Regardless, it's a funny sort of portrait, proud but behind the times, an uneasy emblem of a beleaguered industry town on the decline...

Monday, February 13
reviewed by Karen Jenkins The Appalachian hollers of Eastern Kentucky are a restorative realm for Shelby Lee Adams and photography a tonic. Having dwelled there as a child, he has returned to photograph for nearly forty years...

Thursday, February 9
reviewed by Tom Leininger What does it mean to be a 'photographer'? Today it can be as simple as making a picture with a mobile phone, or a digital camera or it can mean that you are dedicated to a particular process that is no longer in the main stream. It does not necessarily mean that one is interested in making intentional images where the everyday is changed into something more...

Monday, February 6
reviewed by Adam Bell As more and more of our lives are lived online, the spaces and networks within which we communicate and express ourselves become critical stages and playgrounds for the formation and construction of our identities. Facebook and other such social networks are not merely places where we connect with friends and family, but they are spaces where we make public our imagined and real selves...

Thursday, February 2
reviewed by Faye Robson As a British citizen, I have to confess I didn't know much about 'coon hunting before I opened this book. Now having closed it, I'm not sure how much better informed I am...

Monday, January 30
reviewed by Adam Bell Quiet and meditative, Watch the Weather Change is a loosely structured collection of personal images that meander through Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Netherlands. An impressionistic journal, van Duyvendijk's book weaves together such seemingly disparate images as a puppet-maker in his workshop, Hong Kong cityscapes and portraits of an attractive Asian model to make this modest, but elegant book...

Thursday, January 26
reviewed by Colin Pantall Chasing or Following?

Sasha is a story of a girl becoming a woman. Sasha?s mother, Claudine Doury, starts the book with a picture of Sasha gazing into a shiny ball, looking at what the future might hold...

Monday, January 23
reviewed by Daniel W. Coburn In Norse Mythology the word Bifröst is used to describe a burning rainbow bridge that spans between earth and the realm of the gods. In his recent monograph, Espen Krukhaug uses the term Bifröst and a series of photographs in an effort to describe what it's like to suffer from insomnia...

Thursday, January 19
reviewed by Karen Jenkins The ocean for me is the lyrical vision of Hiroshi Sugimoto ? magnetic, impenetrable fields of horizon and sea. It is also an enveloping realm of childhood adventure, persisting in nostalgia?s muted recollection...

Monday, January 16
reviewed by George Slade Several years ago I reviewed Christian Patterson's book Sound Affects in this space. I enjoy extrapolating the accomplishments of newer material from past efforts...

Thursday, January 12
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella Rinko Kawauchi?s Illuminance demonstrates the transcendence of media over message. Her overwhelming, complex volume of images undermines expectation, supplanting it with excitement, as photograph after photograph carries the viewer from simple to sublime, seemingly without effort...

Monday, January 9
reviewed by Adam Bell As sentient animals, we arrogantly pride ourselves on our dominion over the land and its creatures. Entering the 21st century, the demands we have placed on the earth are reaching their limits...

Monday, December 26
reviewed by John Mathews Places, Strange and Quiet is a visual diary of journeys taken throughout Europe, Japan and North America by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders. The locations are possibly discovered through reconnaissance for potential film locations and may act as a way of consolidating Wenders' distinctive cinematic vision...

Thursday, December 22
reviewed by Adam Bell Blurring the boundaries between a philosophical essay and photobook, Ken Schles' new book Oculus is a beautiful meditation on the role of images, memory and perception in our lives. In many ways, Schles' work builds upon the questions and concerns of his last two books...

Monday, December 19
reviewed by Colin Pantall In 1973, Daniel Meadows got a UK Arts Council grant of £750. He bought a double-decker bus, converted the top deck into a bedroom, fitted a toilet, kitchen and darkroom and converted the bottom deck into an exhibition space...

Friday, December 16
reviewed by Tom Leininger The cover of From Uncertain to Blue jumps out at you. Keith Carter's reissue of his seminal early work of small-town Texas feels contemporary in design since Pentagram Austin's DJ Stout and Barrett Fry bring current touches to pictures that helped define Texas to a wider audience...

Monday, December 12
reviewed by David Ondrik The Half-Life of History: The Atomic Bomb and Wendover Air Base, published by Radius Books, is a collection of photographs by Mark Klett and text by William L. Fox that explore Wendover Airbase, where in the 1940s the US Army Air Corps trained to drop atomic bombs from Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft...

Thursday, December 8
reviewed by Karen Jenkins We want to see more, know how, figure things out. Surface only gets us so far, so we look inside hoping the revelation of these parts will illuminate the whole...

Monday, December 5
reviewed by Colin Pantall Chipped paint, fuzzy television screens and naked women. That sums up Scot Sothern's Lowlife, a series of pictures of prostitutes that Sothern visited in the 1980s...

Thursday, December 1
reviewed by Faye Robson 'Through photography, I have learned about love.' The words that open this anthology of Gay Block's work, and give it its title, really are the best possible introduction to her warm and sympathetic photographs...

Monday, November 28
reviewed by Karen Jenkins Douglas Stockdale spends a lot of time looking at and thoughtfully writing about books of contemporary photography as a fellow reviewer for this magazine and as founder of The PhotoBook blog among other projects. His own photography has now been collected in his first commercial book, Ciociaria from Rome's Punctum Editions...

Monday, November 21
reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich I felt compelled to listen to the 13th century hymn Dies Irae while looking at Paolo Pellegrin's collection of the same name. The hymn's first lines describe the apocalyptic world the listener is about to enter: Dies iræ! Dies illa/Solvet sæclum in favilla:Teste David cum Sibylla! (Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets' warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning!)...

Thursday, November 17
reviewed by Adam Bell These days America's Rust Belt seems to be growing ? the long collapsed centers of American industry have metastasized and are merging with the larger landscape of economic woes plaguing the United States. Most often evoked by politicians to decry the stagnant state of the American economy or to celebrate past greatness, it is a landscape often heralded, but rarely visited or known...

Tuesday, November 15
reviewed by Adam Bell Over the past twenty years, large swaths of China's landscape have been transformed and denuded of their natural resources in an effort to propel the country into the 21st century. The skyscrapers of Shanghai or Beijing superficially display progress, but powerful political forces and willful ignorance often hide the environmental cost of such rapid development...

Thursday, November 10
reviewed by Tom Leininger In Ask the Cat, Satoru Toma wanders the area surrounding Brussels as a cat would -- straying into open areas, crawling through the underbrush of the woods and along the edges of society -- looking for photographs. He is drawn to the warm sharp light specific to the region...

Tuesday, November 8
reviewed by George Slade No matter how many people appear in Beth Yarnelle Edwards' photographs, or how captivating the circumstances, the titles are simple -- one or two names, a country or a state (California, a country of its own), and a year. There is one telling exception to the title rule, however, in a pair of pictures titled Home Theatre I from 2000 and Home Theatre II, 2005, in which we see a shot/reverse shot from both ends of a center aisle in a room full of fashionable recliners, video projection apparatus, and popcorn...

Thursday, November 3
reviewed by Ellen Rennard My great-grandfather wrote two books titled Our Great Outdoors -- one volume on reptiles, another on mammals. Thus it is in the spirit of family tradition that I feel I could, on occasion, as Whitman wrote, 'turn and live with the animals...

Tuesday, November 1
reviewed by Tom Leininger My photographic background is in newspaper journalism, which has instilled in me a belief that a strong picture should be able to stand on its own without the aid of words. Topographie by Andreas Gehrke challenged that notion...