The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
Review by Wayne Swanson • It’s just a room, and a very small one at that, but there aren’t many spaces with a presence as large as the Roman Catholic confessional. S. Billie Mandle captures its seen and unseen power in Reconciliation. Mandle, a photographer based in Los Angeles and Western Massachusetts, spent ten years photographing... 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 Wayne Swanson • The deprivation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic knows no bounds. Consider the plight of the Los Angeles jet set. Boutiques on Rodeo Drive shuttered. Beverly Hills Hotel and Chateau Marmont deserted. Even their jets at LAX grounded and shrink-wrapped for freshness until the crisis is over. Those are the scenes... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • My wife’s opinion about this book is that it “brilliantly captures the spirit of California and should be on every coffee table.” Well, there you have it, I thought, why do a whole book review? But I know what our dedicated audience expects and what our editorial policy requires, so... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • The title of this magnificently photographed and beautifully printed photobook is drawn from a poem by Yeats that claims that while humans are afraid of death and look forward to an afterlife, non-human creatures do neither, i.e., the supposition is that ‘animals’ do not dread death nor hope for something... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Ah, the vagaries of time ... and yet, in all of that there is something of enduring value – friendship, the comfort of having kindred spirits. Rick Schatzberg and all the participants have created a unique photobook that has time and bonding as its central themes and that succeeds in... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Mutual admiration between two photographers can be extraordinary, especially when it stimulates new work and when it happens across cultures. Even more important, this universal theme of life and death leaves no one untouched. Nobuyoshi Araki had seen Juergen Teller’s project Leben und Tod including pictures of his grieving mother... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When reality is presented as a hoax and made-up stories are flooding social media to substitute for reality, what do we have left to treasure as our actuality? When writers who question the government are attacked as enemies of the people, does the definition of ‘friends’ get altered to include... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 