The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 Wayne Swanson • Ahh, typologies. So often prosaic as individual images, yet so powerful when presented as a group. French architects Caroline and Cyril Desroche take the idea to an extreme in Los Angeles Standards, with 1300 photos broken down into 15 typologies to classify the elements that visually define the city. Although a sprawling... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • This photobook is a retrospective of the collective published projects of Mona Kuhn, thus aptly titled Works. It is a compilation of her published creative endeavors that she has been laboring on for the past twenty-five years in conjunction with her principal publishing collaborator Steidl. In addition, there are also included some... 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 Paul Anderson • Imagine approaching the rim of the Grand Canyon on a bright sunny day, and watching the stunning natural scenery unfold in front of you. In Thomas Kellner’s new photo book, The Big Picture, you can expect a similar experience as you unfold his massive panorama of the Grand Canyon, made up... Continue Reading →
Welcome to our 25th Issue •We are now well into Spring and patiently waiting for Summer to enjoy the holidays as investigated by Ken Rosenthal's Days On the Mountains. Fingers crossed that this summer might be similar to our distant memories, unlike this past pandemic-haunted summer. We hope that one of the books we reviewed this past month will provide a tease... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Some artists are of their time. Others, like Swiss photographer René Groebli, transcend time. From the 1940s through the new millennium, he assembled a diverse and innovative body of work, often at odds with the conventions and expectations of the moment. The Magic Eye is the first retrospective look at the... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • Among the many poetically posed, yet ambiguously explained, concepts found in the writings of the German essayist and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, one of the most provocative is that of the “optical unconscious.” Introduced in his 1931 essay “A Small History of Photography,” Benjamin compares photography “with its devices of... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • Three street photographers and their three unique perspectives and shared interests; they came together in 2019 at the International Video Art Festival of Camagüey and this photographic book project resulted from that meeting and their time wandering the streets of Camagüey, a city on the island of Cuba. The book’s title, Camagüey, Camagüey, Camagüey subtlety... Continue Reading →
