The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The ‘Toilet Club Milano’ is an Italian night club that welcomes people of all sexual orientations. It has a special place in the LGBTQ world, and features performers that present themselves in drag. Valentina Neri has woven a fascinating narrative around these ‘drag queens,’ including many visual and verbal cues... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The occupation of land by a hostile foreign power is a phenomenon that seems to repeat itself, over and over, and thus it is an ever-present danger. In our time, the 20th century was not the end of such outrageous acts, as the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula, part of... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In 1992 an intriguing book with the title The Reconfigured Eye was published by MIT Press. In our current age of “fakery,” and especially in hindsight, the subtitle of that book is even more intriguing: “Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era.” The point of that book was that the digital... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The use of the leporello technique for presenting a continuity of visuals has a long tradition. In picture postcard presentations, for example, there are interesting varieties going back to the end of the 19th century that present little fold-outs emerging from flaps that show various views of an area. In... Continue Reading →
By Gerhard Clausing • On Saturday, August 24, Douglas Stockdale and I spent a delightful day at LACP (Los Angeles Center of Photography) in Hollywood as jurors for the first LACP photographic book competition. Right from the start, we were pleased not only with the number of entries (well over 50), but especially with the... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This ambitious project by Madhu Joseph John raises some challenging questions: Who are we, and where does our journey take us? Are our differences in appearance, age, location, preferences and our levels of experience really so important that we will allow them to be used as a basis for dividing... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Abendlied (Evening Song) is a project that is very personal, yet has universal meaning. The concept seems simple: as we gradually take leave of our parents we have memories of events and feelings from long ago; things come back to remind us of what we experienced with them in the... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In these tumultuous times there is much to ‘beware of’ – many anxieties that have followed us since childhood and from centuries past are now catching up with us again and are turning into new existential fears. The archetypal nightmares from long ago, archaic and simple as they may have... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This photobook by Cristiano Volk is all about the mysterious and historic Venice, Italy. It is a novel view of a place that has been incessantly photographed, resulting in zillions of predictable tourist snapshots that imitate tourism brochures. The city is built on islands, always poised to battle the surrounding... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In a 1953 episode of the very dated and otherwise questionable American TV series Amos and Andy, the character Kingfish is shown pretending to be a French teacher, incongruously using a poster of the old German-American entertainment/nostalgia “Schnitzelbank” song. He tries to convince his ‘student’ that it is the finest... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 