The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
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 Gerhard Clausing • From time to time we wonder what life is all about. Special moments and places can intensify such musings, for instance, when we are looking at a wonder of nature, such as a giant gorge cut into a wild landscape – like a giant throat ready to consume us –... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Here’s a question you may not have considered until now: What’s the connection between the social conventions of human gestures and the storing and reemergence of images, both in our minds as well as on film and analog photographic paper? Anja Manfredi has been the director of the Friedl Kubelka... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In some respects, Germans believe in equal opportunity – they give credit to their parents for country and language: Vaterland is ‘fatherland’ and Muttersprache means ‘mother tongue.’ As history has shown, however, the term Vaterland carries a heavy burden, as it is associated with the sins and atrocities of the... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Thana Faroq is not only a successful exiled woman from Yemen who found a new home in the Netherlands, she is also an excellent storyteller who uses her considerable photojournalistic talents to present us with a captivating account of the travails of age-old sojourns, once again taking place in our... Continue Reading →
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 • 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 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 Douglas Stockdale • Alice Jankovic has created an introspective and poetic artist book inspired by a recently found family archive that includes a worn copy of Thoreau’s Walden. It may have been Thoreau’s book that was the inspiration for one of her early family members to make a pivotal decision to live in the... Continue Reading →
