The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • It is possible to develop many misconceptions about people and countries that we don’t know much about. Some of those views may be based on one-sided reports and specifically slanted selections of what is shown and described to us. It is equally common for journalists and photojournalists to concentrate on... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Very seldom do we encounter photobooks that not only are a total surprise but can serve to entertain us too. This is one such exceptional example. During the height of the pandemic, Kessels and Sauvin exchanged visuals from their extensive collection of anonymous ‘vernacular’ photographs with each other, and now... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Communicating with one’s parents can be quite a chore, no matter at what age we find ourselves. And for a girl growing up, her dad is that special guy who usually serves as the first example and model of what men might be like later on in her life. This... Continue Reading →
Review by Debe Arlook • “I love to return to spaces I have already photographed. To see how they change through time. A new crack in the road, a dried bush in the distance…like us, the landscape also changes.” Dino Kužnik’s quote, along with the pastel-pink, card-wraparound cover printed with D I N O, one... 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 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 →
PhotoBook Journal 