The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The word vale can have a number of meanings. It can imply a farewell, a letting go of things that perhaps are unattainable or forever lost. Or, it can be a valley, a hidden place between hills or mountains that may not be so easy to get to or to... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega • The cover of Mark Gill’s photobook The Airborne Toxic Event shows a solitary figure crossing an intersection dressed in a red, full-length hooded jacket wearing a mask, carrying a couple of tote bags and, oddly, wearing open-toed sandals. The man in red, as it turns out, is also the only... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Is ‘normal’ boring, is ‘unorthodox’ exciting? And what are YOUR definitions and expectations? In a way we are all performance artists. We present ourselves to the rest of the world in many forms and guises. To represent our style, to express particular personal meanings or beliefs and rituals – to... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Who doesn’t love the smell of sweat, stale beer, and vomit? Who doesn’t fondly remember the danger of getting your eye poked out by the spikey hair of an amped up punk thrashing around in a mosh pit? Not you? Well then move right along Granny; this aint your book.... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Small towns, villages, rural areas – the ‘provinces’ – are the backbone of any country, and they always cover large areas. So it is in Poland, and the Dędeks, Jacenty and Kasia, spent more than six years capturing life as it was found there. Naturally, the result is a weighty... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • How do you decipher the unfamiliar and the unknown? What cues from your past can be applied to new, unfamiliar shapes and textures, seemingly incomprehensible, yet eerily demanding your attention? Do you need to design your own new personal visual system or “language” to deal with such new information that... Continue Reading →
Review by Darin Boville • When I was a young man I labored through the book On Photography, by Susan Sontag. I was a subscriber to the New York Review of Books, though not during the early 1970s when the chapters in this book were initially published as separate essays. I was also a subscriber to MIT’s... Continue Reading →
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 Douglas Stockdale • Regina Anzenberger’s Roots & Bonds is a self-published book that appears to be a mash-up of Paul Caponigro photographs and Abstract Expressionism artwork while reading like we are peeking into an artist’s private sketch book. Even more so when we find images with her hand-written notes in the margins of the... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • “Where are we going?” “I wanted to show you nothing.” Coming from most people, that explanation would hardly seem appealing. But William Eggleston is not most people. “Nothing” has earned him his place as a seminal figure in modern fine art photography. When he told Harmony Korine and Juergen Teller... Continue Reading →
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