The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Melanie Chapman · One of the rare gifts of the year 2020, perhaps the only silver lining to a deeply challenging period for so many people throughout the world, has been the opportunity/necessity to look within for a sense of mystery and adventure. We’ve all been required to slow down our frenetic modern pace... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Very seldom do we encounter photobooks that not only are a total surprise but can serve to entertain us too. This is one such exceptional example. During the height of the pandemic, Kessels and Sauvin exchanged visuals from their extensive collection of anonymous ‘vernacular’ photographs with each other, and now... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Once upon a time, itinerant photographers armed with crude homemade cameras worked the street corners and parks around the world, creating inexpensive memorabilia and first-time photographic experiences for the masses. Then came the rise of cheap personal cameras followed by the digital revolution, and these photographers largely disappeared. Now a... Continue Reading →
Review by Debe Arlook • “I love to return to spaces I have already photographed. To see how they change through time. A new crack in the road, a dried bush in the distance…like us, the landscape also changes.” Dino Kužnik’s quote, along with the pastel-pink, card-wraparound cover printed with D I N O, one... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The American painter Robert Henri, who also spent some time in Paris, once said, “When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it.” This is a principle that also very much applies to the Chinese photographer 9mouth, who has a special affinity for depicting the... Continue Reading →
Review by Kristin Dittrich • Timm Rautert combines three lives in one: artist, theoretician and teacher, a professional in the field of photography for half a century. During his photography studies with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School in Essen, he moved away from the “beautiful picture” in the classic sense, as he puts it,... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • One person’s nightmare is another person’s reality. Sometimes the two realms are connected in mysterious ways. Roger Ballen is certainly the great master of showing us the seemingly absurd that impinges on the everyday, and here we have another, even more complex journey into Ballen’s universe. This time there is... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Here’s a question you may not have considered until now: What’s the connection between the social conventions of human gestures and the storing and reemergence of images, both in our minds as well as on film and analog photographic paper? Anja Manfredi has been the director of the Friedl Kubelka... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In some respects, Germans believe in equal opportunity – they give credit to their parents for country and language: Vaterland is ‘fatherland’ and Muttersprache means ‘mother tongue.’ As history has shown, however, the term Vaterland carries a heavy burden, as it is associated with the sins and atrocities of the... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Thana Faroq is not only a successful exiled woman from Yemen who found a new home in the Netherlands, she is also an excellent storyteller who uses her considerable photojournalistic talents to present us with a captivating account of the travails of age-old sojourns, once again taking place in our... Continue Reading →
