Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 i Aperture

Even after two years of living in Seoul, I’m continually astonished by the famous pace of change here. Chic coffee shops alight, rebrand, and disappear almost overnight. Chunks of a neighborhood will suddenly be fenced off, bulldozed, and readied for development. A map of the subway system that I bought when I first arrived is already out of date, missing the latest stops—something truly bizarre to a longtime New Yorker. The capital city’s art scene has been undergoing quicksilver changes, too, as big-league international galleries such as Gladstone, König, Tang, and many more have opened branches. To get a sense of just how remarkable the shifts of recent decades have been, I recently looked back at the sparkling on-the-street photographs that Han Youngsoo made in Seoul in the 1950s and…

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This simple yet powerful declaration, a mantra even, opens The White Album, Joan Didion’s quintessential 1979 collection of essays. Following that first line is a series of sentences conjuring narratives that read with the clarity of a photographic or cinematic still: “The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.” Until her death in 2021, Didion held titanic sway over the American literary scene—and her distinctive appearance traveled into the broader public imagination. She was often portrayed by celebrated photographers, becoming an iconic, self-styled image in her own right. Though Didion didn’t write much about photography, unlike her contemporaries Susan Sontag and Janet Malcolm, her prose did something photographic through its crystalline rendering of thorny realities and the flotsam and…

In 1996, the British photographer Nick Waplington wrote out a handwritten slogan that states: “EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE IS HAPPENING NOW.” Published in Safety in Numbers (1997), his account of a year on the road in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Johannesburg, and London, it’s a line that might also describe Waplington’s methods, as he often makes photographic series without a sense of his final intention. “I keep work when I am not really sure why I am making it at the time. I build up an archive to use in the future, and then I’ll come back to it,” Waplington says. “For example, I took a lot of pictures from the age of fourteen to twenty that I only started publishing in 2014.” Waplington is committed to the…

Returning to the place we came from is not as easy as it seems. It is not enough to take a flight and walk the streets we have walked so many times. There is no shortcut back. On the contrary, it is necessary to heed the exhortation of Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca”: “ask that your way be long.” The past can be accessed only through symbolic deviations, through displacements and intermediations. This sometimes means representation, performance. To see long-lost friends from the past, imagine them in other bodies. Make them move as they never moved before. Yvonne Venegas knows how to distrust the apparent immediacy of the image as a vehicle to the past. From her interrogation of the family archive to the reinterpretation of key works of the male…

Mary Manning’s favorite color is green. In the artist’s photographs, we are shown an everywhereness of green. Green is neighborly, the most charitable color, according to Mary. Green is a pile of fallen ginkgo leaves fanning out on a car windshield. Green is the long open legs of a ladder. Green is the color of friends gathering in a beloved New York park, since destroyed by the city. Green is Nicole’s studio T-shirt, Maia’s sweater backstage, little Lucky’s winter coat, Emma’s snail. Even Mel’s denim looks green from Mary’s point of view, or maybe green is what happens to the viewer’s gaze when spending time in Mary’s world. Green is what happens! Mary’s work takes place at the threshold of joy and recall. The instant is stretched; the instant is…

Celebrated for her monumental portraits, Jordan Casteel has quickly become one of the defining painters of her generation. Casteel uses photography to make studies of her subjects—people she’s met in Harlem, or her art students at Rutgers University—who are then immortalized in charismatic colors. The camera is her “liaison” to an exchange of gazes, and each portrait becomes an evocative story about everyday life. You started using photographs as a reference tool for your paintings when you were in graduate school almost ten years ago. How did that practice develop? I was seeking to make larger-scale portraits—particularly of Black men—and I wanted them to hold space in a room. Up until that point, I had been mostly painting from life. Then I started taking photographs of subjects in their homes.…

In 1936, while Evans is employed by the US government’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), Fortune magazine commissions him and the writer James Agee to document the plight of cotton tenant farmers in the American South. They focus on three families, including Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs and their children. Evans’s 1938 Museum of Modern Art show, American Photographs by Walker Evans, and its accompanying catalog, includes a portrait titled Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife. A portrait appears in U.S. Camera Annual 1939 in a folio of Farm Security Administration images. It’s captioned “Magnificent Propaganda”—words taken from a visitors’ comments book at an exhibition of the photographs held in early 1938 at New York’s Grand Central Palace. With Fortune having rejected the photographs and text, Evans and Agee…

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s home and studio are on an upper floor of an eight-story former commercial building in the NoHo Historic District of New York. Completed in 1893 and named by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1999, it was designed by the German American architect Alfred Zucker at a time when the area’s Federal-style mansions were being replaced by high-rise structures. Fox Solomon has lived and worked inside Zucker’s iron, granite, and terracotta building on Broadway since 1984. Her loft is a treasury for a nomadic life spent traveling around the world taking photographs of people—meeting them where they live. For more than fifty-five years, she has built an affecting body of images attentive to the human condition, probing its vulnerability and struggles, scrutinizing the pleasures and toxicities that define…

“My mind veers inflexibly toward the particular,” Joan Didion writes in her 1965 essay “On Morality.” When it comes to the concrete and specific, you might say there’s a continuum among her cohort (now mostly gone) of great American essayists. At one end, Susan Sontag’s epigrammatic judgments, with their relative lack of empirical texture. In the middle, Janet Malcolm’s fine attention to peculiarities of person or place. Then there is Didion, out along her own axis, where the essay is almost all detail. Sontag and Malcolm wrote extensively about photography. Didion, very little. But such is her mix of vision, exactitude, and atmospheric effect that her work seems more suited than that of others to sit alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, with an eye toward making connections. In their introduction…

Adraint Bereal is in a tight spot. He spent much of 2021 on the road, taking more than a dozen flights, plus Amtraks, buses, and rental cars. He lived out of his suitcase for months, lugging along eight cameras—point and-shoot, Polaroid, medium-format, “everything you could think of”—until the weight of all that gear wore him down. He shipped all but two home and kept going. Bereal’s mission was heavy enough: to meet at least one hundred Black college students across the country, capture their lives in images and words—preferably their own—and compile this material in The Black Yearbook, the second iteration of a project Bereal birthed in his senior year at the University of Texas at Austin. Returning from his travels, he faced another, more challenging task: meet a book…

Sometime in the middle of the last century, Charles “Teenie” Harris became known for often taking only one picture of his subjects, and was aptly nicknamed “One Shot” by the former mayor of Pittsburgh David L. Lawrence. “He was fast,” Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the Teenie Harris community archivist at the Carnegie Museum of Art, told me over Zoom in late October 2022. “He’d run in and say, ‘Get together, everybody, I’m only gonna take one shot.’” With a determined energy, Harris took “one shot” many, many times in his long career, capturing the ordinary beauty of Black life in the city. Professionally, Harris started out at the Washington, DC–based Flash Weekly Newspicture Magazine, but he had been exposed to photography since he was a small child. For more than forty years,…

Alejandro Cartagena does a lot. He is a photographer. He is a publisher at Studio Cartagena and a copublisher, with Carlos Loret de Mola, at Los Sumergidos, a small independent bookmaker based in New York and Mexico. He self-publishes some of his own books; others are published by the likes of Skinnerboox, in Italy, and Gato Negro Ediciones, in Mexico. And sometimes he is just the author. He is an in-demand photobook editor and, most recently, as a cofounder of the NFT organization Fellowship, is deeply involved with the NFTs scene. Cartagena’s overall practice as an indefatigable bookmaker—thirty-three books and counting—has produced a compelling network of inquiries about social, urban, and environmental issues related to Monterrey, Mexico, where he lives, and to Latin America in general. His work is at…

As a child growing up in Argentina, Alessandra Sanguinetti came under the spell of illustrated books, from classics by Dorothea Lange to Time Life compendiums. When she began to make pictures, a curiosity about life in rural communities and how people connected to the land drove her vision. These projects led to a tender and ambitious chronicle of the evolving relationship of two young girls through adolescence and into young adulthood. Sanguinetti recently published Some Say Ice (2022), a disquieting gothic set in small-town America, inspired by Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy’s macabre cult classic of nineteenth-century archival excavation. Sanguinetti’s riff may be contemporary, but it’s just as eerie. Fernando Pessoa Discovering Fernando Pessoa when I did, during a bit of a dark period, was like finding a long-lost best…

It is said that the kamaitachi spirit resembles a weasel, rides on a whirlwind, flies through the air, and moves so incredibly fast that before you know it it’s already gone. With strong and sharp claws, the invisible beast attacks suddenly and sucks blood from its victim’s wounds. Such a kamaitachi, half-naked and with its clothing blown up by the wind, jumps high in front of a group of curious farm children. Darkly surreal, a female head appears under a male arm and stares at the viewer, her eyes wide open. An androgynous figure runs across Tokyo. A young woman sits pensively between portrait paintings and striking busts with crying faces. Hauntingly poetic and depicted in high-contrast, these scenes tell of human physicality, sexuality, and a wide array of emotions.…

Each May, the villagers of Jawhar District, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, come together for a festival called Bohada celebrated throughout the region. Donning papier-mâché masks, select members of the Kokna and Warli tribes put on ritual performances involving song and dance. Over a number of nights of pageantry, actors play the roles of various deities and demons, bringing to life well-known mythological tales. In 2015, the photographer Gauri Gill approached the brothers Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, from a family of hereditary mask makers, with a proposition. She commissioned the Kadus to make masks representing contemporary everyday reality rather than fantastical episodes. Gill then photographed volunteers from their village wearing these masks, posing not as characters from legends but as themselves in improvised scenes. Over more than thirty…

Throughout the pandemic, the popular conception of home became a place of unrelenting monotony—a site of confinement, despair, potentially even breakdown. Creativity was stifled when stuck in one’s living room. It was impossible to maintain professional output while sharing a space with one’s children. To many women, this new obsession with the inside, the domestic, was both frustrating and amusing. Home was now a space confining both sexes. And yet, female artists have long centered home as a site for probing discussions and creative explorations. The resultant works often deal with the themes that contributed to women’s very presence at home in the first place: sexism, pay disparity, childcare inequality, patriarchal conditioning and control. The domestic and, in turn, the family have been popular topics within the history of photography,…