The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Since its beginnings 200 years ago, photography has occupied an uneasy territory between what is seen and what is not. Photographs record moments that have already vanished; they transform the visible world into a trace of itself. In A Lineage of Spectral Femininity, Hali Autumn embraces this condition not as... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Helen Levitt’s photographs have often been described as street photography, but that term is too narrow for what she accomplished. The street, for Levitt, was not merely a location. It was a stage, a playground, a studio, a social club, a theater of small dramas, and sometimes a wall-sized sketchbook.... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Brooke DiDonato’s Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer subverts everyday life quietly from within. The photographs infiltrate our reality, introducing small impossibilities, spatial contradictions, and bodily misalignments that accumulate into a sustained, disorienting logic, characterizing a topsy-turvy world through a certain amount of disturbance, which in turn invites contemplation.... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Rich-Joseph Facun’s 1804 examines Athens, Ohio, an Appalachian town whose economic and cultural life is closely tied to Ohio University. Rather than constructing a conventional documentary narrative, Facun structures the book through a carefully paced sequence of portraits, architectural observations, and quiet still-life fragments. As the images accumulate, the photographs... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Thomas Hoepker’s DDR / East Germany – Colour Works 1972–1990 is a remarkable photobook, not because it reveals shocking new truths about the German Democratic Republic, but because it insists on looking carefully, patiently, and in color at a place that was more often described than seen. The photographs, so... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Getting in touch with your inner self is not an easy task. Meditation is one of the ways that makes this possible, and Axel Kirchhoff has successfully photographed people at various stages of confronting their inner being. This photobook presents whole-body images as well as close-up portraits of dozens of... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Ed Kashi’s new photobook, A Period in Time, feels like both a personal diary and a sweeping portrait of our shared world. It gathers images from his more than 45 years as a photojournalist into one powerful collection that is as emotional as it is informative. This compendium is more... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This photobook is the fourth volume of Nick Brandt’s epic series The Day May Break, and presents its most urgent and intimate chapter yet. Brandt turns his focus toward one of the most extreme settings of climate and humanitarian crisis: the arid deserts of Jordan, where displaced Syrian families navigate... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When you first hold this large loose-leaf book project in your hands, the sheer impact of its size and its images is overwhelming. We get that same feeling when we are overwhelmed by incessant appeals on all our “entertainment” media which are our constant companions – on phones, television, etc.... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • As always, one has to take a very deep dive into people’s psyche, including one’s own, to understand the art of Roger Ballen. His latest publication, Spirits and Spaces, continues his exploration of the human psyche and the ambiguous terrain in which dreams, nightmares, and realities intersect. Ballen has always... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 