Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i Aperture

Marion Palfi Although Marion Palfi’s photographs elicit comparison to works by her peers, such as Berenice Abbott, a friend of Palfi’s in the Photo League in New York, or Dorothea Lange, another photographer employed by the Farm Security Administration, Palfi’s commitment to documenting injustice set her apart. “She would implant herself in communities, almost like an anthropologist,” says Audrey Sands, who curated the exhibition Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America, 1940–1978 at the Phoenix Art Museum. Palfi’s career as a self-described “social research photographer” meant that her work often went unpublished and unexhibited. In Phoenix, her most pertinent images will be on display, including close studies of race relations in Georgia and relocation projects targeting Native Americans in the Southwest. The photographs, taken with the watchful eye of an…

Page 35: August Sander At one point I wanted to do what Sander did; he photographed each type of German between the wars. I can’t tell what type people are. But we have August Sander to tell us. Page 36: Luis Buñuel Belle de Jour is one of the sexiest films I’ve ever seen. Pierre Clémenti was my dream man in my adolescence. And Catherine Deneuve, the perfect woman. Andy Warhol When I was thirteen, the banana album and the early Interview mags were my lifelines. The Factory girls influenced me to shave off my eyebrows, and they never grew back. Nico was the voice of death. John Cassavetes I’m still obsessed with Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Their films are the closest to real life. His people fight to sustain…

Libuše Jarcovjakova lives on the fifth floor of a handsome stuccoed house in the New Town district of Prague. When she was a child, her family resided at the same address, on the second floor, which they moved to when she was seven. The residential building is set between two landmarks: the National Theatre, an icon of Czech history and art, and Žofin Island, one of a number of small islands in the Vltava River that runs through the city. Jarcovjakova identifies with the river and the island. “It was my childhood, and I spent a lot of time there,” she said earlier this year. “It was always my starting point, coming out of this house and photographing obvious things like seabirds.” The opening pages of Jarcovjakova’s 2019 monograph, Evokativ…

Daragh Soden’s 2017 series of portraits, Young Dubliners, is an unabashedly romantic and cumulatively poignant study of the young denizens of Ireland’s capital. The portraits fizz and simmer with the ambivalent restlessness of adolescence, the balmy summer sense of energy to burn: A couple, languorous and pensive, gaze out the window from the back seat of a Dublin Bus. A pack of teenage boys, stripped to swim trunks, their pasty torsos already pink-tinged with incipient sunburn, jockey for the attention of two bikini-clad girls on a harbor wall on a sunny day. On a housing estate a family in the driveway of their home watches a kid on a bicycle pop a wheelie rambunctiously into frame. For all its surface celebratory vibrancy, Young Dubliners is an inherently elegiac work, composed…

Abdul Kircher comes from a family of artists. His grandfather was a painter known for his vivid Pop art, and his great-grandfather and great-uncle were goldsmiths. A lineage of this sort comes with a certain kind of pressure—to appreciate art, to find a medium, and, in short, to eventually create. Kircher, who was born in Berlin and raised in Queens, found photography when he was fifteen, and it quickly became his practice of choice. He was a Tumblr kid—those early adopters of the social-media platform who valued graphic and aesthetically pleasing depictions of life—and posted photographs of himself. But when Kircher’s friend lent him a point-and-shoot camera, the range of his subjects expanded considerably. His early work sought out stories of the people society had chosen to ignore: the homeless,…

If you let him, 223 will come over to your place, open your fridge, rummage through your closet, and inspect your bedroom on a search for props he can use for an impromptu photo shoot. His friends have grown accustomed to his ever-present camera. Taking photographs has become second nature. “Some people, when I meet them, I immediately want to take their photograph,” he says. “Others, I’ll know for years, yet it never occurs to me to do that. I really can’t explain why. It’s just a feeling, a connection between us.” Lin Zhipeng, the photographer known as 223, named himself after the lovelorn Hong Kong police officer in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express. Born in Shantou, China, in 1979, 223 spent his childhood on an army base in…

Three friends lie in a bed together, limbs touching. One has her arms in the air, having just lit a cigarette. A cool intimacy breezes through the frame. They wear bell-bottoms, and the boy’s wide-collared shirt is slightly unbuttoned. They look disheveled, as if they’ve just come in after a night of dancing. The image, from Pablo Bartholomew’s 2008 book Outside In, 70’s & 80’s, A Tale of 3 Cities, catches a mood. A very particular mood—the effervescence of youth, a fizzing, intrepid air. Bartholomew worked on the images that make up Outside In through the 1970s until 1983; the earliest photograph, dated 1972, was taken when he was seventeen years old. He was a curious teenager with an eager eye. Raised among artists, he began taking photographs at the…

The year is 1977 tucked into 2018, and Times Square is playing its grittier, garish, four-decades-younger self. Cigarette smoke floats above the gloam of the Hi-Hat bar, dark and loud and disco, the setting of an exhibition opening for Viv (played by Adelind Horan). She darts around the room snapping pictures of her friends dancing and flirts dangerously with the bartender as patrons inspect her photographs, pinned to the red-painted brick walls. Not everyone is a fan. A red-haired woman peers at an image of a red-haired woman who looks a lot like she does, sitting in a bar that looks a lot like this one. “I coulda done that,” she scoffs to the guy next to her, whose good-natured smirk shows behind his mustache. “Eh, I kinda like it,”…

According to many, fashion is superficial—it is about surface, exaggeration, frivolity. It is, both as a sensibility and a process (the act of getting dressed), about adopting and embracing a disguise, a cover-up. Fashion, at its best and its worst, relies on an acceptance of the fake—the external. Fashion photography is, then, a festival of trickery, a heady, multilayered performance. Ironic, then, that Nan Goldin, a photographer whose work is so frequently described as “truthful,” who makes pictures about the internal—pictures that, like jolts to the heart, move us, through the sheer relief of recognition and emotional relatability—is a fan of the fashion image. Goldin discovered fashion photography in the early 1970s through the work of Guy Bourdin. She was particularly enamored with his shoe advertisements for Charles Jourdan and…

Nan Goldin moved from Boston in 1978 to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was twenty-five years old. New Wave was starting to happen, and so was she. Nan went everywhere with her camera. She was part of the Times Square Show in 1980, on her way, it would turn out, to the Whitney Biennial in 1985 and beyond. She was creating The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1983–2008) as a slideshow during this time, when the underground, of which she was a star, suddenly riveted the attention of a larger culture. This new youth vanguard was urban and music-driven, as into film as it was into books. Stylistically, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency claimed descent from Weimar (the echo of a song title from The Threepenny Opera in Nan’s title is…

At least one thing was true: he was the toughest fag in Boston. He called himself Mark Dirt then, and he published Dirt, a fanzine of fake celebrity gossip for the late 1970s Beantown punk scene—“the magazine that DARES to print the truth”—along with his friend Lynelle White. His stories, which shifted over the years, always seemed like approximations of his exceptionally brutal childhood: his mother was a prostitute, and his father abandoned the family to frequent periods of homelessness. He was hustling at fourteen when a john shot him in the back, crippling him for life. Lies, like masks, can help shield us from truths too difficult to face, and so they often appear in the vivid accounts of Mark Morrisroe, as he is mostly known, and the revolutionary…

“A relationship was ending, and I wanted to get some pictures of us together,” the photographer Sunny Suits said recently from her home in the Marais, the once-bohemian Paris neighborhood. “That’s what I consider the beginning of my work.” Suits makes photographs, almost exclusively in color, about people she has loved and admired, often of people loving and admiring one another, although not always, and not always forever. She stills a certain kind of emotional complexity into recognizable events, like that moment, in Filipa Kissing Barbara, Comporta (2012), when a lover’s hand at another’s throat can be both warming and warning, an attempt to hold on that just pushes away. “It’s not so sharp and clear,” Suits says of this portrait of her friends, “but none of that matters. It’s…

“To be an activist,” the artist Martha Rosler said in a 2019 interview, “you probably have to be working intensively with a specific community and a specific issue or set of issues.” Rosler is well known for her expanded documentary practice, which has been called activism, as with If You Lived Here…, her polemic 1989 project on homelessness. In its companion book, she noted that “social activists, certainly, continue to recognize the importance of documentary evidence in arguing for social change.” That relationship between documentation and activism threads through the work of several contemporary photographers and filmmakers in different ways: some work with specific communities on specific outcomes; some create or participate in activist campaigns to speak out publicly against governments; while others invoke activism through photography, at times as…

What’s remarkable about Clifford Prince King is his ability to make strangers seem both intimate and removed in his work. There is a sense of perceived recognition with his images. Friends of friends you’ve been meaning to meet are within the frames. The faces of under-the-radar creatives whose work you respect but have never told so in person peer back at you. “Oh, I know him,” you hear yourself say to no one in particular as you gaze on the heartbreakingly youthful subjects that make up King’s world. Queer Black men—friends, lovers, some nebulous place in between—lying languidly across bare apartments, cornrowing each other’s hair, holding blunts to one another’s mouths, or staring meditatively away from the camera, naked. The viewer is able to gain what King describes as a…