The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Fran Forman is a visual magician, a multi-talented storyteller with many mysterious tales, who shares with us a lifetime of experiences that she has deeply felt. She makes those experiences and feelings manifest and externalizes them through miraculous photographic compositions which engage our hearts and minds. This thoughtfully crated art... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • When the title of a book has a double meaning, I am delighted from the start. “So long” can mean saying goodbye, particularly to an unpleasant time period, and it can also mean that whatever is referred to has been going on for a long while. Both meanings certainly fit... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • What we find missing in our childhood can sometimes be filled in a bit later in our lives in various ways. So it was with Sonia Lenzi, whose father had not been as accessible in her earlier years as she had wished; in recent years she gained personal access to... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Sublimation of grief is a partial remedy that artists can use to make life more bearable. Julia Vandenoever, having lost her mother to cancer and her brother to addiction, was able to see connections between her own childhood and that of her own children growing up, with parallel events and... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • In these very dangerous times, democracy as well as the human race seem to be on the chopping block – two things at the core of our continuing existence. We find that the principles which we once thought were ironclad and generally permanently accepted suddenly are considered pliable and bendable,... Continue Reading →
Review by Douglas Stockdale • An apt way to describe Ewa Monika Zebrowski’s artist book, van gogh’s bed, is that it has punctum, a work of art that is imbued with emotional impact. Which also serves as a subtle clue, for those who are familiar with Roland Barthes, the late French philosopher, as to the indirect subject of this body... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Not too long ago, the term “abandoned moments” meant images that we would toss aside: subject not significant enough, not sharp enough, some blurring or out-of-focus areas, camera movement, and more. Well, nowadays that is the stuff that the finest photographic art is made of; they are the central techniques... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • This photobook presents quite a challenge, and I found it also deeply touching in many ways, having spent several weeks with it ... and I am not done yet, by far. So many discoveries ... Helga Härenstam came upon a nearly 300-year-old poem, James Thomson’s The Seasons. That work, popular... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • A friendship that can be traced back to our youth and has lasted into the present is something to be treasured and celebrated, if we are lucky enough to have such close ties to another person. Solarski and Liboska can share recollections that go back 30 years, to their early... Continue Reading →
Review by Gerhard Clausing • Throughout the 20th Century there were some artists that overcame the traditional rules of “straight” photography and dared to take liberties with their interpretation of reality by means of special effects. Those working in the style of pictorialism come to mind, as well as the forerunner of digital manipulation, William... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 