Review by Gerhard Clausing • Collecting can easily be very intense, perhaps more so than other pursuits. But then other kinds of activities including photography have been known to become highly ritualized as well. Need I remind you of the meticulous pursuits of water towers in order to present them in tomes of typologies, or... Continue Reading →
Rich-Joseph Facun – Little Cities
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Studying cultures is like conducting philological detective work with a palimpsest manuscript from the Middle Ages. New phenomena arise and mostly wipe out evidence from the past. So it is with the American cultural studies in this project by Rich-Joseph Facun. The original indigenous cultures of Ohio seem to have... Continue Reading →
Interesting Photobooks of 2022
Another year has gone by, so it’s time for us to present you with our new list of interesting photobooks. Our selections feature intriguing photographic content, brilliant project concepts, and excellent book designs that support the artist/photographer’s intent in conjunction with spot-on production qualities; the books that are the most interesting have a delightful combination... Continue Reading →
Antoine Seiter & Marc Faysse – J & A
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This photobook presents the coming-of-age process of two people, a young woman and a young man, each in a different world. The former is presented as a series of photographs, while the latter is a short story in French, bound into the middle of the book. The photographer Antoine Seiter... Continue Reading →
Jens Knappe – Genesis
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When we are trying to visualize ancient times or the future, we do not have access to pictures taken with cameras. At best, we have a few sculptures, drawings, and paintings dealing with the past, and nothing at all when it comes to showing us what we imagine might come... Continue Reading →
Niko J. Kallianiotis – Athênai: In Search of Home
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Revisiting a place you have seen before is always full of many surprises. My wife and I have been to Athens a number of times and find the experience always exhilaratingly different; alas, as one would expect, even our relatives there are never quite the same as on the previous... Continue Reading →
Roger Ballen – boyhood
Review by Gerhard Clausing • At times some of us feel a certain nostalgia and want to go back to our youth. We long to be boys or girls again, thinking that things were simpler in our youth. We imagine that life was more innocent and more harmonious than what we now face as adults.... Continue Reading →
Anne Morgenstern – Macht Liebe
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This photobook is quite extraordinary – it took me a number of months to figure out what to say about it that would go beyond the obvious. Perhaps you know the old “September Song” with the line, “Oh, it’s a long, long time from May to December…” (Kurt Weill and... Continue Reading →
David Butow – BRINK
Review by Melanie Chapman • Though we may wish that it were not so, now is not the age of poetry. We live in bombastic times. Giant waves crash, rivers flood, forests burn, plagues descend. We reach for metaphor and instead are inundated with product placement versions of morality; superheroes peddle mega merch. Collagen lips... Continue Reading →
Laurence Philomène – Puberty
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Puberty and coming of age—a time to look inward as one reaches out to the world. We are not all the same, and in accepting and welcoming various different orientations, we may reach some levels of discomfort as we reexamine old stereotypes and preconceived categories into which we previously may... Continue Reading →