PhotoBook Journal Resistance | Thinking About Photography

PhotoBook Journal

I'm pleased to welcome back PhotoBook Journal with selections from Gerhard Clausing, Douglas Stockdale and their team of Contributing Editors on books that explore resistance. I encourage you to use the links to read the full versions of their thoughtful reviews.

The Uyghurs: Kashgar before the Catastrophe by Kevin Bubriski

Review by Gerhard Clausing

Some 25 years ago, the group of people known as the Uyghurs, a large ethnic minority in China, primarily of the Islamic faith, were still relatively unencumbered by much outside control. Since then the Chinese government has imposed many procedures on these people that have received international criticism. In 1998, just before all these latest developments, the renowned documentary photographer Kevin Bubriski captured the cultural traditions and life of the Uyghurs, creating a kaleidoscope of their time, a valuable time capsule now presented in this new photobook that provides us with interesting insights.

Use this link to read the rest of the review, additional images and information.

Alive and Destroyed, by Jason Francisco

Review by Steve Harp

Where to begin with Jason Francisco’s Alive and Destroyed? Where does one begin considering, weighing, wrestling with a volume as unsettling and provocative as Francisco’s images of “small and forgotten” sites of the Holocaust across Eastern Europe, made between 2010 – 2019? One place to begin might be with the opening of the “Afterword” by Menachem Kaiser, who writes, “Holocaust photography is not like other sorts of photography. The rules, you might say, are different . . . “ Indeed. As one who has photographed sites of the Holocaust and spent the following years simultaneously baffled and daunted by the images arising from those projects, these words resonate. The question continually bedevils as to how meaningfully, intelligently and reverently to represent that which has been both overrepresented, yet never adequately represented. Use this link to read the rest of the review, additional images and information

displaced by Ara Oshagan

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 specific groups of people in specific places at specific historical moments. But beyond this, the two books seem almost mirror opposites. Whereas Let Us Now Praise Famous Men considers three families firmly planted – mired, one might argue – in the land they work in the Depression era south (“How was it we were caught?” Agee imagines the tenants wondering), displaced deals not with the rooted, but with the uprooted – the growth of Armenia’s diaspora in Beirut after the genocide of the early 20th century. Use this link to read the rest of the review, for additional images and information

We Cry In Silence by Smita Sharma

Review by Gerhard Clausing

The trafficking of humans for nefarious purposes has gone on for centuries and is still practiced today. Poverty and/or the promise of some economic gain are usually the motivating factor on the part of the perpetrators. Often relatives or close ‘friends’ commit these betrayals that assault human dignity. Whether it is to exploit people as work slaves or for sexual purposes, the process strips individuals of their integrity and their liberty, blocks their self-determination and development, and causes all sorts of severe and long-lasting damage.

Use the link to read the rest of the review, additional images and information.

TESTAMENT ’22: A Visual Road Diary Through a War Zone by Byron Smith

Review by Lee Halvorsen

On February 24, 2022, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its neighbor and former ally. Byron Smith was there and for the rest of that year he immersed himself and his camera into the lives and the deaths and the hopes of the Ukrainian community. His mostly black and white images ooze emotions and bring a stark sense of the tragic reality of war, violence, and brutality onto the pages of the book. This book is more than a documentary of events and tragedies, it’s collage of instances projecting sorrow, loss, death, horror…but all held together by the will of the people and their positive determination and hope. All captured in these 192 pages from his months of dangerous outings, daring gatherings, all with perfectly timed shutter snaps.

Use this link to read the rest of the review, view additional images and information

Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home by Peter van Agtmael

Review by Gerhard Clausing

There are a number of reviews of photobooks about warfare that I have reviewed over the years. You can enter war in the search box and look at as many of them as you like. But none of them are as comprehensive, as complex, and as personal as this one, in which Peter van Agtmael takes us on a journey that looks behind the scenes over a period of some 20 years, from the Iraq War to the assault on the Capitol in Washington. Use this link to read the full review, view additional images and information.

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