The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Stones, rocks, and mountains come in endless sizes and shapes and are composed of a variety of materials. They are the building blocks of the earth, its very foundation. Leave it to Claudia den Boer, an innovative photographer with a sense of place, to photograph these “stonescapes” and to work... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Have you ever enjoyed a novel, or fallen in love with a painting or film, only to later learn something uncomfortable about the creator or the situation in which the work was produced? Did you find yourself rethinking your reaction based on that new information, or were you able to... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Mardi Gras in New Orleans is an old tradition. Just as is the case in Europe and elsewhere, there are religious and tribal underpinnings to these liberating rituals that have been around for many centuries. Of special importance is the fact that participants can assume alternate identities; they can feel... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Roger Ballen is taking us on another trip – this time viewed through the mind of an alter ego named Roger the Rat. This creature is a life-sized human-animal combo who wears the mask of a rodent and serves as the tool of Ballen’s mysterious puppetry. The fixed expression on... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 21st Issue & the end of 2020 •Whew! We are now preparing for the Spring 2021 books and publications, which no doubt have been in the works for awhile. Always exciting to see what creative new endeavors will emerge. 2020 has been a traumatic year, not only in the U.S. but globally. It is very nice... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, live entertainment played a much larger role in stimulating our imagination. Among the exciting amusements that we fondly remember are circuses and carnivals. When those shows came to town, the otherwise predictable life of a place was touched by another world –... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • As we know from Shakespeare, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The ‘merely’ is to remind us that even the most powerful political actors, who can affect our lives greatly between their entrances and exits, are all subject to final curtains. We also... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • After moving to Southern California and adapting to the zone system for my natural black and white landscape photography, Imogen Cunningham as a result of her affiliation with the West Coast Group f/64 was already legendary. She was well known for her botanicals, nudes, and portraits, as well as a... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • The cover photograph of a book can provide a visual hint of what is yet to come. A vexing book title can add mystery and intrigue. What appears to be an 1800s wet-plate collodion photograph of a woman holding a banner in front of a painted tableaux seems to falter... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • “Beautiful, interesting… and sometimes cruel.” If Robert Frank had played in a punk rock band, how would that have influenced his work? What kind of images would he have made? Luckily, we have Tatsuo Suzuki’s new photobook Friction/Tokyo Street to answer that question. Wow. What an exciting book! One cannot... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 