Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2022 i Aperture

Maurice Broomfield Maurice Broomfield chronicled with a painterly eye a time of great transition in postwar Britain. Working as the country’s leading industrial photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, often on commission, he pictured factory workers with a focus on the dramatic and surreal. In Maurice Broomfield: Industrial Sublime, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, these vibrant and carefully composed images express the photographer’s optimism toward British industrial progress in the wake of war. Broomfield grew up in the country’s heartland, near Derby, and was influenced by both his time working at a Rolls-Royce factory in the early 1930s and his interest in graphic design and painting. Many of the sites in his images have since vanished or been folded into large global corporations. Yet today, as the…

The Texas cowboy poet Red Steagall once wrote about a young cowboy who looked down his nose at the wearisome ranch job of fence building, finding it too mundane and unromantic for a real buckaroo. Consequently, he does shoddy work on a line of fence and receives a lecture from an old ranchman about the importance of doing necessary things well, for their own sake but also, maybe, for the sake of the person one might become: And someday you’ll come ridin’ through And look across this land, And see a fence that’s laid out straight And know you had a hand. The Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson—who came to prominence in 1999 for his harrowing chronicle of a doomed journey by a group of Haitian refugees attempting to travel six…

For Iñaki Bonillas, photography is a form of archaeology. An artist who rarely makes images out in the world, Bonillas instead finds pictures that he clips, crops, and scales up to create new works offering enigmatic narratives. During his deep dive into issues from Aperture’s first decade of publishing—the 1950s, an era before photography had cemented its status as an art—Bonillas was struck by how the magazine, through its rigorous writing and exquisitely reproduced portfolios, endeavored to make the case for the richness, complexity, and expressive possibilities of the medium. From an essay by Nancy Newhall on image captions, citing Dorothea Lange’s skillful use of language, to technically oriented writings on Ansel Adams’s Zone System, the magazine brought readers defining articles that vibrated with the conviction of a manifesto. Bonillas…

“Mothers and daughters! Are there any fantasies or ideal images left to us in this tough-minded age of psychological realism?” So begins the historian Estelle Jussim’s essay for Aperture’s Summer 1987 issue, “Mothers & Daughters,” a catalog in magazine form that accompanied a traveling exhibition of photographs about mother-daughter relationships. “That Special Quality,” the suggestive subtitle offers—is it a definition or a dare? The issue is organized neither chronologically nor typologically. It’s not ethnographic or sentimental. Yet “Mothers & Daughters” relies on both of photography’s elemental impulses: the desire to see others and the desire to memorialize. There are lines of poetry by Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Alice Walker. There are backyards, weddings, beaches, kitchens, embraces, American flags, sashes that read “Votes for Women,” looks of impatience, and gazes…

The twentieth century turned anxiously into the twenty-first—Y2K doomsday. Computers, it was feared, would all implode, and before 2000, feverish nations spent millions to avoid this catastrophe, which didn’t happen, but a year into the century, it did—9/11. The Towers came down, so-called ordinary Americans randomly attacked Muslims, and George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld launched a preemptive, disastrous war against Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. While 9/11’s detritus blew in the wind, polluting lungs, the photography editor Alice Rose George and others curated a pop-up gallery in SoHo to display 9/11 pictures. Amateur and professional disaster photographs covered the walls. Easily taken, easily deleted, cell phone pictures were instant, and instantly blurred categories. In them, the decade found its avatar. In 1991, cell phone…

Kwame Brathwaite, the Harlem photographer who helped popularize the clarion slogan “Black is beautiful,” was known as the “Keeper of the Images.” His pictures of Black models and musicians from the 1960s are essential documents that radiated from New York during an era of Black and African independence campaigns. Although known to scholars and archivists, Brathwaite’s work didn’t reach a wider audience until Aperture’s 2017 “Elements of Style” issue. As an elder statesman of the Black freedom movement, Brathwaite became the “keeper of the stories, too,” Tanisha C. Ford wrote. “If he didn’t share this history, it would be lost to time.” The artist Hank Willis Thomas is also a keeper of the images. “Sometimes I see myself as a visual-culture archaeologist or DJ,” he explains. “All of my work…

As a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific (2016), Hua Hsu has written widely on politics and culture. He recently published a memoir, Stay True (2022), which probes friendship, personal tragedy, and the immigrant experience. Drawn to the fragmented stories amateur photographs leave behind, Hsu is now building a collection of them. In your memoir, you say: “The first generation thinks about survival, the next generation tells the stories.” Is this you telling the stories? Stay True is about a close friendship I had in college, and all the things my friend taught me, and the unlikeliness of our connection. I was a typical 1990s elitist, and he was not. After he was randomly and senselessly killed,…

By day, the Garage, on the South Side of Chicago, functioned as its name would suggest. But on Sundays, the venue transformed into a pop-up dance club, where a predominantly Black crowd would boogie to jazz and R&B from early afternoon through sunset. Right in the midst of the party, crouching on the dance floor with a camera, was Valeria “Mikki” Ferrill, a Chicago-born photographer who spent the 1970s documenting the Garage and whose work has recently been acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). Born in 1937, Ferrill was drawn to various subcultures over the course of her career: the gay scene in San Francisco, African American cowboys, the Nation of Islam. But her most notable images are from The Garage (1970–80), a series that exudes the joy,…

In Aperture’s first issue, published in 1952, the founding editors mapped out the reasons for bringing the magazine to life. With intelligence—and a hefty dose of earnestness—they sought to create a space for photographers and “creative people everywhere” to communicate and speak to one another. This was a daring endeavor at the time, a labor of love driven by an almost messianic belief that photography mattered. Building a community around the publication was essential to their cause. “Growth,” they wrote, “can be slow and hard when you are groping alone.” Photography was a lonely place back in the early 1950s. The medium wasn’t yet widely appreciated as a serious form of creative expression, and so the founders sought to make the case for the power of a still image that…

If the eye has a focal distance for any particular scene, might it also have a focal period, a time span in which an image can be apprehended in perfect focus? The idea occurs to me because of a possibility floated in the last Aperture of the 1960s, a monograph dedicated to W. Eugene Smith that gathers together his sublime expressionist images of atrocity, deprivation, and ordinary pleasure, from the invasion of Iwo Jima to Charlie Chaplin, Haiti, and the KKK. In an afterword on Smith’s work, subtitled “Success or Failure: Art or History,” the critic, collector, and all-around polymath Lincoln Kirstein chews over the contested status of the photograph, coolly disparaging both its elevation to fetishized art object and its capacity for intercession in the realm of realpolitik. Nope…

The photography of the 1970s was marked by competing visions, looking both forward and backward in time. Aperture’s entry into the decade, with a Spring 1970 issue on early French photography, mined the medium’s austere origins in the previous century, while the emotive force of more immediate “snapshots” by Garry Winogrand, Nancy Rexroth, and Joel Meyerowitz collected just a few years later, in the Fall 1974 issue, confronted us with the medium’s potential and scope. In framing this range, the magazine, too, wore many faces through the decade, featuring monographs, thematic explorations, and shifts in appearance. “The size, the format, the design all changed across the 1970s issues,” remarks Yto Barrada, revisiting Aperture’s archive. “I tried to follow the object,” she explains, “to trust the directions given by it and…

In Aperture’s fortieth anniversary issue, published in Fall 1992, there’s a brand-new book advertised in the back pages—William J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. The marketing copy reads: “Enhanced? Or faked? Today the very idea of photographic veracity is being radically challenged by the emerging technology of digital image manipulation.” Mitchell’s book heralded one of the most significant developments in the history of photography: the accelerating shift from analog to digital image formats that would, over the course of the 1990s and in anticipation of the post-truth dimensions of the present day, increasingly render reality as its simulacrum. This shift, Mitchell contends, has been as profound as that from painting to photography, in that digital images are produced through fundamentally different material processes than analog…

The language of technological innovation is tinged with anxiety and awe. Its vision recasts us as beneficiaries of a more connected humanity—somehow both more human and more than human—yet its promise often feels suspect. In a review of William A. Ewing’s 2004 exhibition About Face, which proclaimed the death of the photographic portrait, Vince Aletti writes in the pages of Aperture’s Winter 2004 issue: “Even before photography’s documentary credibility was deliberately and irrevocably eroded from within, pictures of our fellow humans had been stripped of virtually all pretense to revelation, insight, or any but the most superficial emotional content.” This skepticism frames Hannah Whitaker’s silhouetted portraits and still lifes, which address an unease, pervasive in the twenty-first century, about how technology relates to our humanity. Seemingly familiar human figures are…

To get to Mikhael Subotzky’s studio in downtown Johannesburg from the unmissable Brixton Tower, which doubles as my location pin, one can either wade through the concrete jungle eastward, via Newtown or Braamfontein, or take the circuitous highway trip that heads south, then east, before reentering the city from the south, having made the shape of a sickle blade. This second option traverses intersecting overpasses, providing a sense of the fascination photographers have with this city where the sleek banking district gives way to abandoned skyscrapers and mine dumps that are still being extracted (both legally and illegally) for traces of gold. The vast, warehouselike interior of Arts on Main, a compound of galleries and studios one meets on the descent, is the creative heart of the gentrified enclave that…

While looking through issues of Aperture from the 1960s, Dayanita Singh was intrigued by the language within, the inventive—and sometimes cryptic—article titles. She wondered if they might offer a departure point to create a portfolio, but then pivoted to ask: Why hadn’t the magazine focused on domestic imagery back then? Where were the family albums that were a vital form of the medium in South Asia in the 1960s? As an artist, Singh, who won the 2022 Hasselblad Award, has boldly questioned assumptions about how photographs should be presented. She has dismantled default hierarchies of value concerning books versus prints. In her inventive installations, photobooks occupy the spotlight, unfurling on the wall or within a vitrine. The book, not the framed print, is the work. Rather than presenting her own…

“Photography was not a bastard left on the doorstep of art, but a legal child of the Western pictorial tradition,” insisted the Museum of Modern Art photography curator Peter Galassi in 1981, somewhat defensively. At the time, photography was still not widely accepted as a legitimate art form and was scarcely represented in the collections of major art museums. Art and photography existed in distinct and separate domains. Fine-art photography was pursued by the avid few and was always distinguished as being superior to commercial photography and photojournalism. Art photographers and curators generally seemed preoccupied with formalist issues of light and composition and with technical complications of equipment and analog printing—as opposed to, say, concerns of social or political import. The tiny world of art photography, with few galleries and…

In the fall of 1990, as the “culture wars” reverberated throughout the art world, Aperture published an issue titled “The Body in Question.” Reproductive rights, the AIDS crisis, shifting notions of gender, and the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts by conservative politicians were among the roll call of urgent concerns (many eerily echoed today) tackled across its pages. For the photographer John Edmonds, who is celebrated for his emotive, intimate studies of Black masculinity, this issue still resonates. “I thought a lot about ‘The Body in Question,’” Edmonds says, “and had the idea of a group of individuals performing grief.” During a one-day production in New York, in an old building selected by Edmonds for its quality of feeling out of place and time, he cast a…