Bøker av Aperture

Aperture magazine releases winter issue, “Desire,” featuring an expansive interview with renowned fashion photographer Juergen Teller“Photographs can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way,” Susan Sontag observed. Hers was a reference to more prurient activities, but she also allowed that desire could be abstract, something more slippery. The compulsion to want—or, in today’s parlance, to manifest—emerges throughout Aperture’s winter 2023 issue, “Desire,” as both an impulse and a state of mind.“Desire” includes an expansive interview with Juergen Teller, whose photographs upend fashion’s vocabulary of glamour and aspiration, trading conventional beauty for the more peculiar. Artists such as Nakeya Brown, Jonathas de Andrade, Nabil Harb, Oto Gillen, and Marcelo Gomes consider what it means to put one’s own body on display, to break from long-standing customs, to be seduced by raw beauty found in nature or in uncanny artifice. Histories are conjured through evocative personal objects in the work of Ishiuchi Miyako, who for decades has created beguiling images that in two dimensions are at once surreal and surprisingly physical. In “Desire,” photographers render reality as unearthly—and take the viewer somewhere else altogether.

This spring, Aperture magazine presents issue #250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” which explores the relationship between photography and storytelling across generations and geographies. Featuring visual stories that excite, surprise, and illuminate daily life, this issue’s title is a nod to the late, celebrated writer Joan Didion, who declared, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Aperture contributors explore the quiet poetry— or clamorous disorder—of the everyday, and attest that making photographs is a way of being aliveIn a sweeping introductory essay, Brian Dillon asks how we might view Didion through photography, and what images come to mind when we think of her writing. Thessaly La Force profiles Bieke Depoorter, who sees documentary photography both as a listening exercise and a form of investigation, blurring the lines between authorship, fiction, and truth. Alistair O’Neill takes stock of Nick Waplington’s vibrant records of subcultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Lena Fritsch writes about the “exquisite world-making” of photographer Eikoh Hosoe’s collaborative practice. Tiana Reid reconsiders Charles “Teenie” Harris’s vivid, midcentury portraits of Black life in Pittsburgh, several of which are published for the first time in this issue. Among the portfolios, Casey Gerald discusses Adraint Bereal’s images depicting the agony and ecstasy of being a Black college student in the US today. Yvonne Venegas searches for family ghosts in the Mexican landscape, which poet and novelist Daniel Saldaña París describes as “an exercise in freedom and intelligence.” Kamayani Sharma looks at Gauri Gill’s images of a community masquerade in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and its potential to reverse power dynamics inherent in seeing and being seen.  Durga Chew-Bose meditates on the photographs of Mary Manning—also featured on the cover— and their poetic sensitivity toward story and the everyday. For Endnote, Aperture poses six questions for the painter Jordan Casteel. In The PhotoBook Review—included within every issue of Aperture—Bruno Ceschel speaks with photographer, bookmaker, and publisher Alejandro Cartagena about his work. Lou Stoppard reviews a trio of photobooks about domestic spaces, and Aperture’s editors review a range of recent publications.

Anniversary issue features seven original commissions by leading photographers and artists, and seven essays about Aperture’s legacy by award-winning writers and criticsThis fall, Aperture celebrates seventy years in print with an issue that explores the magazine’s past while charting its future. Reflecting on the founding editors’ original mission and drawing on Aperture’s global community of photographers, writers, and thinkers, this issue features seven original artist commissions as well as seven essays by some of the most incisive writers working today––each engaging with the magazine’s archive in distinct ways. Among the original artist commissions, Iñaki Bonillas selects iconic images and texts from the Aperture’s archive from the 1950s to produce open-ended narrative collages. Dayanita Singh reflects on the 1960s and the family album as a serious photographic form. Yto Barrada enacts sculptural interventions to issues and spreads from the 1970s, using remnants of the late artist Bettina Grossman’s color paper cutouts. Mark Steinmetz draws inspiration from the magazine’s Summer 1987 issue, “Mothers & Daughters,” to compose a photo essay of his wife, the photographer Irina Rozovsky, and their daughter Amelia. Considering the matrix of censorship, art, and religion in the 1990s, John Edmonds creates a tableau about family, faith, and grief. Hannah Whitaker explores the turn of the century, and the ways in which our anxieties about technology create speculative worlds. And Hank Willis Thomas draws on Aperture’s issues from the 2010s to create a series of collages that reference traditional quilt patterning, revivifying history and remixing the present.Looking back upon Aperture’s legacy, Darryl Pinckney reconsiders the photographer and editor Minor White, whose vision shaped the magazine for nearly two decades, beginning in the 1950s. Olivia Laing writes about the 1960s and the tensions between reportage and artistry in the work of Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, and others. Geoff Dyer revisits to the 1970s, which he considers a decade of new ideas and deeper reflection on the medium, looking into the works of William Eggleston and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Brian Wallis looks back at the politics, art, identity, and the “culture wars” of the 1980s, while Susan Stryker reflects on Aperture’s archive from the 1990s and its foregrounding of identity beyond the gender binary, evoking Catherine Opie, Elaine Reichek, and Aperture’s pathbreaking “Male/Female” issue. Lynne Tillman illustrates how photographers searched for the tangible in an increasingly digital world in the 2000s, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Salamishah Tillet shows how the photo album became a source of connection and narrative amid the information overabundance of the 2010s.