Art and Photography
Here you will find books in the genre of of art and photography. Reviews are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent review appearing first in the list.
Cinema Panopticum
Cinema Panopticum tells several creepy tales in the manner of Roald Dahl or The Twilight Zone, with pretty standard story-lines, but its ch…
Mnemosyne
Bill Henson was born in 1955 and had his first exhibition of photographs in 1974. An Australian artist, his work has been rather difficult to find in th…
Mome
Mome is a new quarterly release from Fantagraphics featuring work by some of the best new graphic artists around. Some of the pieces will be in s…
Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates
These essays by Bob Levin, previously published in The Comics Journal, examine the value and meaning of comics. …
Read the full review of Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates
Same Difference & Other Stories
Most of Derek Kirk Kim’s comics/stories feature Korean Americans in their twenties, presumably because that is the group he is part of. Most of them wer…
Twilight
Twilight is a collection of forty photographs by Gregory Crewdson. They are carefully staged with a strongly cinematic feel. They are all untitl…
Vernacular Visionaries
The troublesome category of "outsider art" provokes the question "outside of what?" The label has been applied mostly to those creat…
Vagina Warriors
From the publisher’s description of the book: "VAGINA WARRIOR…
Coming of Age in Ancient Greece
Coming of Age in Ancient Greece composes an extraordinarily rich work of scholarly collaboration. Its production involved years of extensive resea…
Clyde Fans
Clyde Fans Book 1 is a graphic novel drawn in black and white with some blue shading. It has two parts, the first set in 1997 and the seco…
New and Used BLAB!
New & Used BLAB! is in two halves, new and used. The new material is not that new however since the book was published in 2003 and some of it…
Nudes and Portraits
Nudes and Portraits is a collection of 120 black and white photographs of mostly naked women. It is squarely in a tradition of artistic erotic ph…
Blankets
Although Craig Thompson’s Blankets is described as an illustrated novel, the author says that it is based on personal experiences, so it has as mu…
In My Darkest Hour
In My Darkest Hour is a mystery. It is so mysterious it is hard to work out what it is about at all. The most interesting thing about it is the…
Photo Icons I (1827-1926)
Photo Icons Volume 1 features 20 important photographs from the start of the field in 1827 up to the work of Man Ray in 1926. It explains…
Fred the Clown
For those not previously familiar with Fred the Clown, this comic book is confusing at first. It is divided into ten chapters, each "a step to happ…
The Mirror of Love
The Mirror of Love is a combination of poetry and images about homosexual love and persecution. The words are by comic book author Alan Moore who…
BLAB! Vol. 15
Having reviewed Blab 12, 13 and 14, there’s a danger of having little new to say about Blab 15, the latest in this excellent series of collections of gra…
Paul M. Smith
Most of Paul Smith’s photography depicts scenes from British male culture. There’s a cartoonish, theatrical element to it enhanced by the fact that all…
Faster than a Speeding Bullet
In Faster Than a Speeding Bullet, Stephen Weiner provides a short history of graphic novels, from the start of comic books up to recent works such…
Mona Kuhn
Mona Kuhn’s remarkable collection of pictures of unclothed people is prefaced by a profound quotation from Victor Tupitsyn. It starts with the following…
Metacreation
Metacreation is a very interesting book. It provides a survey of how a number of artists in the 1990’s used the technologies that grew out of vari…
H R Giger
It is no exaggeration to say that the art of HR Giger has been one of the most powerful forces in science fiction iconography, and through the de-erotici…
An Exact Mind
Peter Myers’ drawings and other pictures would be striking and engaging even if one knew nothing about him. The fact that he has Asperger Syndrome adds…
BLAB! Vol. 14
Fantagraphics’ Blab collections contain some of the most striking pieces of art created in recent years. It is rooted in comic book art, but it h…