Pictures for Charis offers a groundbreaking new work by artist Kelli Connell, synthesizing text and image, while raising vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century. Pictures for Charis is a project driven by photographer Kelli Connell's obsession with the writer Charis Wilson, Edward Weston's partner, model, and collaborator during one of the most productive segments of his historic career. Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston's shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locales where the latter couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. Wilson wrote extensively about her travels and about her, and Weston's, photographic concerns. In chasing Charis Wilson's ghost, Connell tells her own story, one that finds a kinship with Wilson and, to her surprise, Weston, too, as she navigates her own life and struggles as an artist against a cultural landscape that has changed and yet remains mired in the many of the same thorny issues regarding the nature of desire and inspiration, and the relationship of artist and landscape. This rich weave of narrative and images complicates and breathes new life into a well-known set of photos, while also presenting an entirely new and mesmerizing body of work by Connell, her first work combining image and text as a mode of visual research and storytelling. Copublished by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
A searing, diaristic portrayal of a city and society in revolution by Magnum nominee Myriam BoulosIn her debut monograph, Myriam Boulos casts an unflinching eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. She portrays her friends and family with startling energy and intimacy, in states of pleasure and protest. Boulos renders the body in public space as a powerful motif, both visceral and vulnerable in the face of state neglect and violence. Of her approach to photography, Boulos states: “It’s more of a need than a choice. I obsess about things and I don’t know how to deal with these obsessions in any other way but photography.” Featuring a contextual essay by noted writer Mona Eltahawy, What’s Ours showcases Boulos’s strident and urgent vision.
An all-star compilation of essays, interviews, and critical musings about the photobook as an essential part of photographic practice todayThe PhotoBook Reader anthologizes an essential collection of essays, interviews, and brief texts from a stellar roster of artists, designers, and book makers, all passionate about the photobook and its potential for creative expression. Each of the pieces in this richly illustrated reader are drawn from the pages of The PhotoBook Review, a newsprint journal published biannually from 2011 through 2021. This volume gathers the “best of” contributions from the journal’s efforts to foster a deeper understanding of the ecosystem of the photobook as a whole. The selections include deep dives into topics such as “How to Read a PhotoBook” and “The PhotoBook and the Archive,” in addition to critical discussions, such as “What Is a Feminist PhotoBook?” and “Notes for Future Study: PhotoBooks by Black Artists.” Sections on “How to Distribute Your PhotoBook” and “Teaching the PhotoBook” are pragmatic, while more taxonomic, genre-defining propositions include “The Accidental Photobook” and “What Is a Photo-Text Book?” The Photobook Reader offers an engaging record of a remarkable decade of discourse, scholarship, and deepening connoisseurship—an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the photobook.
Collects over 150 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, with over two hundred photographs taken from 1850 to presentThe South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience—from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy—appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity.A Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Lê. Insightful texts by Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern United States as an essential American story. Copublished by Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta
A landmark survey of one of the most significant American photographers of the twentieth centuryBest known for his intimate portrayals of barrio communities of the Southwest United States, Louis Carlos Bernal made photographs in the late 1970s and 1980s that draw upon the resonance of Catholicism, Indigenous beliefs, and popular practices tied to the land. For Bernal, photography was a potent tool in affirming the value of individuals and communities who lacked visibility and agency. Working in both black and white and in color, he photographed the interiors of homes and their inhabitants, often presenting his subjects surrounded by the objects they lived with—framed portraits of family members, religious pictures and statuaries, small shrines festooned with flowers, and elements of contemporary popular culture. Bernal viewed these spaces as rich with personal, cultural, and spiritual meaning, and his unforgettable photographs express a vision of la vida cotidiana—everyday life—as a state of grace. The first major scholarly account of Bernal’s life and work by the esteemed historian Elizabeth Ferrer, Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía is the definitive book about an essential photographic artist.Copublished by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
The highly anticipated second volume to the widely acclaimed and celebrated self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark LionessIn Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Vol. II, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of personhood, queerness, Blackness, and the possibilities of self. Since the publication of the first volume in 2018, Muholi has continued to photograph themself in a range of new international locations. Drawing on material props found in each environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black individual in today’s global society, and—most important—speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Renée Mussai, curator and historian, brings together written contributions from more than ten curators, poets, and authors, building a poetic and experimental framework that extends the idea of speculative futures and the potentiality of multivalent selves. Powerfully arresting, this collection further amplifies Muholi’s expressive and radical manifesto. As they state in the first volume, “My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance—existence as well as insistence.”
An intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artistsThroughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef Koudelka considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects—from his early theater work, to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape. Josef Koudelka: Next embraces all of Koudelka’s projects and his evolution as an artist in the context of his life story and working process, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of almost a decade with Koudelka—as well as ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide—this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer. Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris has independently crafted a unique, in-depth, and revelatory personal history of both the man and his photography.Josef Koudelka: Next is richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, including many biographical and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, as well as iconic images from his work, from the 1950s to the present. The visual presentation is conceived in collaboration with Koudelka himself, as well as his longtime collaborator, Czech designer Aleš Najbrt.
The first publication of Ernest Cole’s photographs depicting Black lives in the United States during the turbulent and eventful late 1960s and early ’70sAfter the publication of his landmark 1967 book House of Bondage on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole moved to New York and received a grant from the Ford Foundation to document Black communities in cities and rural areas of the United States. He released very few images from this body of work while he was alive. Thought to be lost entirely, the negatives of Cole’s American pictures resurfaced in Sweden in 2017.Ernest Cole photographed extensively in New York City, documenting the lively community of Harlem, including a thrilling series of color photographs, as he turned his talent to street photography across Manhattan. In 1968 Cole traveled to Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, as well as rural areas of the South, capturing the mood of different Black communities in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The pictures both reflect a newfound hope and freedom that Cole felt in America, and an incisive eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed. This treasure trove of rediscovered work provides an important window into American society and redefines Cole’s oeuvre, presenting a fuller picture of the life and work of a man who fled South Africa and exposed life under apartheid to the world.
Ari Marcopoulos is an inveterate maker of zines. This project collects in one volume for the first time a selection of zines by Marcopoulos, many never before released, providing a unique insight and overview into an essential part of this influential artistâ¿s daily practice. Often self-published or created in collaboration with boutique and independent publishers like ROMA, Dashwood Books, and PPP Editions, these informal, DIY-aesthetic creations function as sketchbook, diary, installation space, and a means of processing Marcopoulosâ¿s daily practice of photographing his life, his family, his neighborhood, and the rarified cultural milieu in which he operates. This collection showcases an impressive array of printed zines, exploring each as an artistic object through an engaging layout. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically per year, key zines are featuredâ¿including some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen, making PDF zinesâ¿and punctuated by individual images presented full scale. An interview with Hamza Walker underscores the role of zines as an essential part of Marcopoulosâ¿s artistic practice, emphasizing the personal, diaristic element within the work, while an essay from Maggie Nelson meditates on the workâ¿s position within a wider social and cultural context. Ari Marcopoulos: Zines is a must-have for anyone interested in this prolific artistâ¿s personal practice and zine culture.
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.
Dark Waters, Kristine Potterâ¿s second monograph, continues her engagement with the American landscape as a palimpsest for cultural ideologies. In this dark and brooding series, Potter reflects on the Southern Gothic landscape as evoked in the popular imagination of âmurder balladsâ? from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs, capturing the landscape of the American South, and creating a series of evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of their stories. In the American murder ballad, which has taken on cult appeal and continue to be rerecorded even to this day, the riverscape is frequently the stage of crimes as described in their lyrics. Places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadmanâ¿s Pond are haunted by both the victim and perpetrator of violence in the world Potter conjures, reflecting the casual and popular glamorization of violence against women that remains prevalent in todayâ¿s cultural landscape. As Potter notes, âI see a through line of violent exhibitionism from those early murder ballads, to the Wild West shows, to the contemporary landscape of cinema and television. Culturally, we seem to require it.â? Dark Waters both evokes and exorcises the sense of threat and foreboding that women often grapple with as they move through the world. Author Rebecca Bengal contributes an evocative short story that underscores the sense of anxiety and foreboding that Potter infuses into each of her images; a deliciously compelling, if chilling, combination. Copublished by Aperture with Images Vevey and The Momentary
In his project Community Fire, the photographer Zhang Xiao takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (ç¿¿ç?«), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural Northern Chinese communities that includes temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling. Shehuoâ¿ literally, âcommunity fireâ?â¿is devoted to the worship of land and fire, and boasts a history of many thousands of years. During the festival, people hold ceremonies, pray for the next yearâ¿s good harvest, and confer blessings of peace and safety on all family members. However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with myriad regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. In the early 2000s, Shehuo received an âintangible cultural heritageâ? designation from the Peopleâ¿s Republic of China, resulting in increased funding in exchange for greater government involvement. While altering the practitionersâ¿ relation to Shehuo, this change expresses itself most visually in the way costumes and props have been replaced with newer, cheaper products from online shopping websites. Zhangâ¿s colorful and fantastical photographs capture how these mass-produced substitutions have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Community Fireâ¿with essays in English and Chineseâ¿is a dynamic visual exploration of one of Chinaâ¿s oldest traditions. Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum PressÂ
Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph by rising interdisciplinary artist Awol Erizku. Working across photography, film, video, painting, and installation, his work references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, from hip hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. This comprehensive monograph spans Erizkuâ¿s career, blending his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer working regularly for the New Yorker, New York magazine, Time, and GQ, among others, and features his conceptual portraits of Black cultural icons, such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan. As Erizku recently told the New York Times, âItâ¿s important for me to create confident, powerful, downright regal images of Black people.â?Featuring essays by critically acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, and interviews with the artist by Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent, Mystic Parallax is a luminous and arresting testament to the artistâ¿s tremendous power and originality. Copublished by Aperture and The Momentary
In this volume of The Photography Workshop Series, Vik Muniz-known for his playful pictures that complicate what is understood as a photograph, sculpture, and painting-offers his insight into thinking creatively and seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways. Aperture works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography-offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, Muniz shares his creative practice and artistic inspirations, and discusses a wide range of topics, from generating ideas and creating images that challenge viewers' perceptions, to collaboration, imperfection, and the interplay of subject, scale, and material.
Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter weaves together self-portraits and classically bucolic landscapes punctuated by the traces of East Asian stories embedded in the topography of the American South.  In this first major monograph, featuring almost a decade of work, Tommy Kha explores the highly personal psycho-geography of his hometown. As the artist states, âMemphis has become, for me, not only the place where I was raised but an active borderland between fantasy and memory, nostalgia and history, nonfiction and mythology.â? Memphis is where his mother, fleeing Vietnam in the early 1980s, settled, along with his extended family. Throughout the work, his mother emerges as a recurring character, sometimes the subject of quiet photographic study, and in others, a collaborative muse. âIâ¿m a cut of my mom,â? Kha asserts, âEvery photograph I make of her is a Half Self-Portrait.â? In snapshots drawn from a family album that serves as the one record of her journey to the United States, she is the source of nostalgia and barely captured memory. In assembling a visual account of the struggle to find his own voice and narrate the fragmented history of his family, Kha challenges the cultural amnesia around Asian lives and experiences in recent American histories. Acclaimed author Hua Hsu contributes an engaging essay, âPeople Need to Smile More,â? and MacArthur Fellow An-My Lê conducts an incisive conversation with Kha that delves into his family history and artistic strategies.  Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter is the result of the Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in collaboration with the 7|G Foundation. An exhibition of the work will open at Baxter St in New York in February 2023.
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.
A landmark in the history of modern art, People of the 20th Century presents the fullest expression of the German photographer August Sander's lifelong work: a monumental endeavor to amass an archive of twentieth-century humanity through a cross section of German culture. Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life, capturing bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families, to create a catalog of the German people, arranged by their profession, gender, and social status. First imagined in the 1920s, he pursued the project for more than fifty years during a politically charged and rapidly changing time, fraught by two world wars and the devastating repercussions of Nazism. Sander never finished the seven-volume, forty-nine portfolio magnum opus, continually refining and shaping it to convey an understanding of the world in which he lived. The photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the wars and form one of the most influential achievements of the twentieth century. Now made available again, People of the 20th Century brings together the exquisite reproductions and principal texts of the long out-of-print, seven-volume edition, as well as the main scholarship from the accompanying study edition. This all-in-one edition, with 619 photographs, offers the most comprehensive iteration of Sander's still-essential vision.
"Aperture is proud to bring this best-selling and indispensable title back into print, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Diane Arbus's groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Diane Arbus: Revelations explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of this wholly original force in photography. The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career"--
Overpass is about what it means to move through the landscape. Walking along a vast network of centuries-old footpaths through the English countryside, artist Sam Contis focuses on stiles, the simple structures that offer a means of passage over walls and fences and allow public access through privately owned land. In her immersive sequences of black-and-white photographs, they become repeating sculptural forms in the landscape, invitations to free movement on one hand and a reminder of the history of enclosure on the other. Made from wood and stone, each unique, they appear as markers pointing the way forward, or decaying and half-hidden by the undergrowth. An essay by writer Daisy Hildyard contextualizes this body of work within histories of the British landscape and contemporary ecological discourses. In an age of rising nationalism and a renewed insistence on borders, Overpass invites us to reflect on how we cross boundaries, who owns space, and the ways we have shaped the natural environment and how we might shape it in the future.
Bettina is the first monograph to showcase the work of the previously unsung artist Bettina Grossman, whose wildly interdisciplinary practice spanned photography, sculpture, textile, cinema, drawing, and more.An eccentric personality fully dedicated to her art, Bettina lived in the famous Chelsea Hotel from 1968 until her death in late 2021. In her tiny studio, she produced and accumulated a considerable body of work, much of which has remained unseen and unpublished until now. Her interests ranged from geometric and abstract studies, drawn from observations of people on the street, to pieces that transformed language into graphic, abstract “verbal forms.” Incorporating strategies of chance and the abstraction of everyday form through repetition and seriality, Bettina pushed the photographic medium to and beyond its limits. As Robert Blackburn, artist and founder of the Printmaking Workshop, astutely observed of Bettina’s work: “The photography, film, sculpture are as one, for the photographic medium is employed not only for documentation but as an endless source of inspiration from which other disciplines emerge—and merge.”Bettina was the winner of the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2020 and is copublished by Aperture and Éditions Xavier Barral.
"'Revolution is love: a year of Black Trans Liberation' is the powerful and celebratory visual record of a contemporary activist movement in New York City, and a moving testament to the enduring power of photography in activism, advocacy, and community. In June 2020, activists Qween Jean and Joela Rivera founded the Stonewall Protests, weekly actions centering Black trans and queer identities that took place across New York City." "This book gathers twenty-four photographers who share images and words on the demonstrations, preserving this legacy as it unfolded."--Back flap of printed paper wrapper.
A Kind of Prayer presents the first-ever survey dedicated to the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais and his singular body of work on Indigenous identity, community, and colonial memory. After his untimely death at age forty-seven in 2011, Metchewais left behind a wholly original and expansive body of photographic and mixed-media work. At the center of his practice is an extensive Polaroid archive, which addresses a range of themesâ¿including the artistâ¿s body, performative self-portraiture, language, landscapes, and everyday subjectsâ¿and served as the source material for works in other media, such as painting and collage. Metchewaisâ¿s exquisitely layered works offer a poetic meditation on his connection to home and land, while challenging conventional narratives and representations of Indigeneity. Metchewais was a contemporary artist of stunning originality, and until now, his work has been woefully understudied and underexposed. A Kind of Prayer is a comprehensive overview that showcases this essential artistâ¿s astonishing vision.
"A collection of essays by Sunil Gupta offers an unparalleled firsthand account of the influential photographer and curator's practice since the 1970s"--
Aperture magazine presents “Celebrations,” an issue that considers how photographs envision ceremonies, festivities‚ and allow us to discover euphoria in the everyday.Throughout the issue, photographers portray exuberance against a backdrop of political strife in Beirut, pursue the thrill of wanderlust, excavate family histories, and respond to the powerful, constant urge to gather. Whether in Kinshasa’s vibrant nightlife of the 1950s and ’60s or London’s sweaty dance floors of our era, jubilation carries on, despite an ongoing, and unpredictable, pandemic.In “Celebrations,” Lynne Tillman contributes a survey of landmark images of celebration through the years, by artists from Malick Sidibé and Peter Hujar to LaToya Ruby Frazier. Several profiles and essays—including Alistair O’Neill on Jamie Hawkesworth, Moeko Fuiji on Rinko Kawauchi, Tiana Reid on Shikeith, Mona El Tahawy on Miriam Boulos, and Anakwa Dwamena on Marilyn Nance’s views of Lagos, Nigeria during FESTAC '77—reveal the celebratory gestures embedded in vibrant portraiture, serene slants of light, unbound queer desire, and joyous cross-cultural exchange.
The first monograph by sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer Shikeith, Notes towards Becoming a Spill brings together a series of striking studio portraits of Black male subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.Shikeith describes the work as "leaning into the uncanny,” visualizing ritual and the process of excavating Black men's erotic potential, the better to exorcise the "intangible presences that haunt their bodies and psyches.” The men's faces and bodies glisten with sweat (and tears)—the manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as "an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” In this revelatory volume, Shikeith redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a Queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy. Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous contribution of 7G Foundation.
Sales PointsA stellar group of critics and artists distills the wisdom of artist and educator Richard “Chip” Benson A rich, wide-ranging account of a unique and innovative figure who made a lasting impact on the medium of photographyFor everyone interested in the American lineages of photographic craft, community, and mentorship
Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective.Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star's lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist's singular vision.Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts
Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twelve years on the road.
Sales PointsThe first major monograph by rising star Zora J Murff, recipient ofthe inaugural Next Step Award, a partnership between Apertureand Baxter St at the Camera Club of New YorkAn incisive, autobiographic retelling of the struggles and epiphaniesof a young Black artist working to make space for himself andhis communityA generous book, elegantly designed by WORK/PLAY, an interdisciplinarypartnership between artists and designers Kevin andDanielle McCoyOther titles by artist:OMAHA, by Zora J Murff. Kris Graves Projects, 2018, $300.00 USD Corrections, by Zora J Murff. Aint-Bad Editions, 2015, $40.00 USD
This fall, Aperture magazine presents an issue exploring the idea of cosmologies—the origins, histories, and local universes that artists create for themselves.In an exclusive interview, Greg Tate speaks to Deana Lawson about how her monumental staged portraits trace cosmologies of the African diaspora. “What I’m doing integrates mythology, religion, empirical data, dreams,” says Lawson, whose work is the subject of major solo exhibitions this year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.In an in-depth profile of Judith Joy Ross and her iconic portraiture, Rebecca Bengal shows how a constellation of strangers is brought together through Ross’s precise, empathic gaze. “Ross is guided by a rapt, intense, wholehearted belief in the individual,” Bengal writes.A portfolio of Michael Schmidt’s acutely observed work from the 1970s and ’80s reveals the realms within realms of a once divided Berlin, while Feng Li’s surprising black-and-white snapshots zigzag between absurdist dramas in various Chinese cities. Ashley James distills the surreal visions of Awol Erizku’s still lifes and tableaux; Casey Gerald contributes a sweeping ode to Baldwin Lee’s stirring 1980s portraits of Black Southern subjects; and Pico Iyer meditates on Tom Sandberg’s grayscales marked by both absence and reverence.Throughout “Cosmologies,” artists cast their attention on the great mysteries of both personal and shared lineages, tracking their locations in space, time, and history, and reminding us of the elegant enigmas that can be unraveled close to home.
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