The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 →
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 →
PhotoBook Journal 