Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2023 i Aperture

Alfredo Boulton Alfredo Boulton had multiple lives. The Venezuelan photographer, art critic, historian, collector, and publisher was born into a wealthy Caracas family in 1908. As a teenager, he studied and traveled in Europe, where he met avant-garde artists who would shape his vision—and the trajectory of modern art in Venezuela. Boulton is “shockingly underrecognized outside of his home country,” notes the curator Idurre Alonso. But that’s likely to change with Alonso’s exhibition Alfredo Boulton: Looking at Venezuela (1928–1978), drawn from the Getty’s acquisition of Boulton’s extensive archive in 2020. Boulton’s photographs show the influence of modernists such as Man Ray and his fascination with Venezuela’s history, expressed in his heroizing images of fishermen and cowboys. In 1952, he photographed the celebrated matador Luis Sánchez Olivares as he was dressing…

In the early hours of February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military began knocking on the doors of dissidents. The Tatmadaw, as they are officially known, had launched a brutal coup that swiftly overthrew the democratically elected government. Within weeks, the military transformed the country into a full-fledged dictatorship, suppressing peaceful protests with lethal force and arresting anticoup activists. The move was reminiscent of the junta that had ruled Myanmar in various forms from 1962 to 2011, evoking a familiar horror for those who had lived through previous takeovers. For the younger generation, which had come of age in a relatively democratic and free Myanmar, the coup represented an existential crisis. Due to the junta’s ongoing efforts to repress citizens’ freedom—including enforced disappearances, long prison sentences, and executions—the majority of Myanmar’s population…

The German Ghanaian artist Zohra Opoku first visited Ghana in 2003, having grown up in East Germany. In 2011, she relocated to Accra, where the emotional and aesthetic inspiration she finds in the city has become a prevailing element in her art. As Opoku says, “Once you are in Ghana, Ghana becomes you and you become Ghana.” Through a practice centered on textiles and photography, Opoku explores nuanced themes of cultural identity. She prints directly onto textiles, weaving together archival images, family photographs, and self-portraiture to create lyrical composites that marry personal experience and collective memory. In 2019, Opoku received a diagnosis of breast cancer. She began her most recent body of work while receiving treatment in Berlin and continued its development during an artist residency in Dakar, Senegal, at…

“Small Rally, Accra.” 1964. Townspeople, watching and listening with rapt attention, sit in a semicircle, oriented toward a speaker just outside the frame. It’s a mixed group: uniformed high-school girls in sleeveless white dresses, men in traditional woven cotton cloth worn toga-style, others in long sleeves and slacks with a cigarette clasped between their lips. Children of all ages sit, squat, and crouch on the swept-dust floor. A juvenile rebel stares at the photographer—Paul Strand. A group of women sit on a bench in front. Signs pinned to their headscarves say “C.P.P.”: Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party. The scene is an early glimpse at Nkrumah’s ongoing project of building a modern Ghana, a new country that piqued the attention of seemingly the whole world. Where the Cold War thinking held…

Family albums are the starting point of the series Sunday Special (2022) by Carlos Idun-Tawiah, who draws on the semiotics of earlier Ghanaian photographers’ work to create his own visual language. It’s a language that resonates with a bygone time but is also deeply contemporary. Incorporating his experience with fashion photography, from Vogue to GQ to Harper’s Bazaar, Idun-Tawiah’s photographs emit the highly stylized tone of editorial spreads and, at the same time, the intimacy of personal pictures of friends and loved ones. Idun-Tawiah who is based in Accra, was born in 1997, exactly forty years after Ghana’s independence. His vision is steeped in nostalgia—both personal (depictions of young people attending school, visiting the barber, playing soccer, or going to church) and collective (poses, fashions, and hairstyles). He conjures visceral…

It was a cool January afternoon in 2021. People walked down a quiet neighborhood street in an Accra suburb and passed through the nondescript brown gate into the walled-off compound to witness a bit of history. Inside, more than sixty guests were greeted with music, libations, and an explosion of color. Above them hung open, rainbow-colored umbrellas, and Ghanaian and pride flags unfurled from a window of the brick bungalow. It was the official opening of Ghana’s first community center for LGBTQ people. Organizers with the group known as LGBT+ Rights Ghana had worked and raised funds for years to create a place where queer people could find community. They told guests that this was a safe space for any queer person who needed shelter or just wanted a library…

The illicit thrills and dusty landscapes of suburban California are the raw material of Mimi Plumb’s arresting black-and-white photographs. Girls sneak a cigarette, boys play amid tires, freeways spiral into the sky, and the threat of wildfire looms endlessly. Buildings are bombed out and punks dance all night. Plumb grew up in the Bay Area and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Lately, her work from the 1970s and ’80s, which eerily predicted environmental chaos and the transformations of the American West, has received retrospective treatment through the photobooks Landfall (2018), The White Sky (2020), and The Golden City (2021). In Plumb’s eye, the future has already arrived, and the end is already beginning. Cricket, the lead mare For several years, Cricket always avoided me. She was the lead…

Lyle Ashton Harris arrived in Ghana in 2005 to teach at NYU Accra, a study-abroad campus of New York University. Not entirely by chance, his entrée into the company of a select branch of Ghana’s political community was facilitated partly through introductions made by myself and my family, and partly because of the status accorded professors, since education is a strong marker of class in Ghana. I immediately secured him housing at Scott House, a celebrated modernist home, bringing Harris to the epicenter of Accra’s established patrician society. In September of that year, I invited him to join us at the Brazilian Embassy Residence in Accra, where he photographed a charitable fundraiser for the Infanta Malaria Prevention Foundation, which had been established by a group of society women that the…

The warm orange glow of the streetlight in Early Risers I (2021), the photographer Kay Kwabia’s atmospheric image of daybreak in Sekondi-Takoradi, tipped me off. Its soft emission fused with the incandescent car headlights to illuminate a corner of the dimly lit street. That light, spilling onto the cream-colored building, prompted me to sift through my bookshelves, where I pulled Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In the first scene of the Ghanaian writer’s sharp and cynical debut about a fledgling postcolonial nation, a driver disembarks from a bus and tries to light a cigarette: “The head refused to catch, however; there was only the humid orange glow as the driver resignedly threw away the stick and took out another.” Is it a coincidence…

It is often said that if you are unable to locate a particular item in Makola Market, or get assistance from a trader who knows where to find it, then the product does not exist—or it’s not available in Ghana. But only when you go to Makola does this image of a one-stop shop become apparent. Though chaotic at first glance, the market is clearly structured, so you may wind through hawkers and petty traders to lanes of vendors selling imported fabrics and wax prints, or wigs, hair creams, relaxers, and conditioners—sometimes all at the same table. There are stalls, kiosks, and tabletop shops in the market and open-air areas. You may stumble on wholesalers of beauty products, candy, combs, and spare parts, among other goods that reflect the ingenuity…

For more than four decades, John Akomfrah has sought to tell myriad tales of migration and belonging. Akomfrah left Ghana for the UK as a young child after the country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown in the 1966 coup, which put his activist mother’s life in danger. In a 2012 interview for The Guardian, Akomfrah stated that his father’s death was due in part to the turmoil and “struggle leading up to the coup.” In 1982, he and a group of peers cofounded the organization Black Audio Film Collective. Inspired and energized by the work of theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, the collective addressed landmark moments in British history with an astute critical gaze, connecting the discrimination that migrants to England faced to the malaise and…

Rodney Smith A Leap of Faith Paul Martineau, with contributions by Rebecca A. Senf and Leslie Smolan, and an introduction by Graydon Carter Featuring more than two hundred stylish, witty, and sophisticated images, this lavish volume is a celebration of the life and work of fashion photographer Rodney Smith. Liberated The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun Kaz Rowe This young-adult graphic biography explores the life, art, and activism of genderqueer, Surrealist French artist Claude Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore. Arthur Tress Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows Edited by James A. Ganz, with contributions by Mazie M. Harris and Paul Martineau A richly illustrated volume that presents the first critical look at the early career of American photographer Arthur Tress, one of the foremost proponents of magical realism and…

Since winning its independence from British colonial rule in 1957, Ghana has been a beacon for liberation and civil rights movements around the globe. During the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, the country became a storied center of Pan-African thought, political activism, and spiritual connection for artists and intellectuals. That role has been sustained throughout the decades. In 2019, the Venice Biennale presented the first-ever Ghana Pavilion, designed by the celebrated architect David Adjaye and featuring an array of participants, including the filmmaker John Akomfrah and the photographer Felicia Abban. Earlier this year, the Scottish Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko became the first curator of African descent to direct the Venice Architecture Biennale, turning the spotlight on creative production across the continent. Today, Accra continues to capture the global…

The first time I heard of a photographic archive in Ghana was in 2009 after returning to Accra following studies in London. I was the editor of Dust, a quarterly love letter to Accra that documented the city’s (then) nascent cultural scene. We were drafting an article about one of our inspirations—the iconic South African magazine Drum (which published photography by the likes of Ernest Cole and James Barnor in the 1950s and 1960s)—when my photo-editor, Seton Nicholas, mentioned the Willis Bell Archive. Bell, an American photographer who died in 1999, snapped thousands of images during a long residence in postindependence Ghana, including commissioned photographs of Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Those photographs are currently being restored and digitized by the Mmofra Foundation, a nonprofit organization continuing the work of…

Located in Ghana’s capital, Accra, Nima is a predominantly Muslim urban settlement, considered to be one of the country’s oldest and largest zongo communities. Common throughout West African cities, zongos have roots in Hausa culture, and are linked historically to Muslim Hausa traders who traveled throughout West Africa and settled in various cities in the region. Over time, zongo communities came into being largely through the influx of immigrants of various ethnic groups from neighboring countries and the influence of Islam. In Nima, residents come from northern Ghana and countries such as Mali, Guinea, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. As a result of rural-to-urban migration, and the socioeconomic conditions and inequities attributed to rapid urbanization in the Greater Accra region, Nima is often described as an impoverished area. The photographer Fibi…

Lloyd Foster’s sculptures don’t immediately reveal their full faces, which is typical of things that haunt. Last spring, at his solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, in Midtown Manhattan, I had to tiptoe in some corners, crouch in others, to see the undersides of the sculptures that were floating closest to the rafters or the walls. The works are coy, but they’re not too precious. They’re made of insulation foam embellished with thick streaks of acrylic paint. One is draped in a mosquito net. Each has an inkjet print pasted to one side of the foam, photographs Foster took primarily in Ghana, his family’s home country, a place that the artist—who was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Maryland—had never seen until his midtwenties. Foster takes photographs for a…

PHAIDON ISBN: 9780714859040 $29.95 I £19.95 I €24.95 The Nature of Photographs A basic primer on how photographs function visually, The Nature of Photographs explores how the tools and materials of photography translate the world we see into a photograph. It is intelligent and sensitive and knowledgeabl-knowledgeable in the sense that it was written by a serious and ambitious photographer; out of the experience of a serious and ambitious photographer. —john Szarkowski Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography Expanded Edition An essential handbook for anyone interested in learning more about mastering one’s craft and the distinct threads that come together to inform a creative voice. Modern Instances is the textbook I've been waitingfor. It’s about crafl and biography, as the subtitle suggests, but it’s also a guide for living. —Alec…