Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2016 från Aperture

“ The tourist hopes to catch something through his lens, while the traveler seeks to surrender, even to be claimed by a surprise in very real life,” celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer notes in his introduction to a portfolio of Jacob Aue Sobol’s photographs made while riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The unexpected route, the captivating spell of wanderlust, and the lure of the unpredictable bind the images in this issue. From early twentieth-century expeditions like those of Vittorio Sella, who created sublime views of the world’s most treacherous mountains, to the recent documentary projects of Invisible Borders, a West African photography collective, the camera is central to the journey—not just a means to prove the trip was made. Even so, for Emeka Okereke, the artistic director of Invisible Borders,…

I’m guessing that some readers of this magazine attended an event held at the Aperture Gallery in New York in the fall of 2013 to celebrate the publication of Understanding a Photograph, a collection of essays on photography by John Berger. I’d edited the book and on the panel with me were fellow writers and admirers, including Lawrence Weschler and Wendy Lesser, who spoke wittily and cleverly about what Berger meant to them. But by far the most memorable contribution came, appropriately, from the only photographer on the panel, Christophe Agou. I’d met him years earlier at the Frieze London Art Fair through Matt Stuart, a street photographer who, unlike Garry Winogrand—famously contemptuous of the term—considers it the best job description in the world. We had dinner, drank a lot.…

Natalie Bell is an assistant curator at the New Museum in New York. The Pyramids of Giza—vessels of history, myth, and mystery—have been a frequent point of reference in Maha Maamoun’s work, which places a special focus on their persistent use as archetypes and clichés of travel photography. An Egyptian artist and photographer, as well as a founding board member of Cairo’s Contemporary Image Collective, Maamoun is acutely aware of photography’s critical role in representing ideas, forging narratives, and shaping media and society. Egypt’s massive architectural icons, more often than not mediated by a foreigner’s lens, have furnished countless imaginations with impossibly romantic and exotic representations that persevere to this day. Maamoun, who regularly challenges systems of representation and ways of looking, lives in Cairo, the labyrinthine, ten-centuries-old city of…

“ President Roosevelt has expressed his lively interest in the enterprise,” Annie Smith Peck wrote in 1908, soliciting a small donation. Ten cents—“a mite toward the large sum needed for the important expedition to set out June 29”— could buy a set of pictures taken by Peck, then fifty-eight years old, printed in support of her quest to ascend Mount Huascarán in the Peruvian Andes. A suffragist and a distinguished, multilingual American scholar of classics and archaeology, Peck was renowned for her mountain climbing, even as fame invited skeptical criticism. (Upon her descent from the Matterhorn in 1895, Peck attracted a flurry of press coverage for conquering the mountain—in pants, instead of a skirt.) Peck’s picture postcards for the Huascarán fundraiser, some featuring photographs taken in 1906 on previous climbs,…

Michael Hardt We have entered an era—let’s call it the post-Occupy era—in which questioning the benefits of capitalist society has become commonplace. Steve Lambert’s installation, which a friend told me about last year, grasps this new political condition by deploying the spectacle of commodity culture, with Times Square billboard lights and a salesman’s enthusiastic exclamation point. This is not, of course, the aesthetic of contemporary capital but that of some bygone era, one in which the answer to Lambert’s question was a foregone conclusion—or, really, one in which the question couldn’t even be asked. The temporal disjunction created by recalling the past confidence and hegemony of Cold War capitalist ideology emphasizes all the more clearly its fragile basis today. And the political effect of Lambert’s project doesn’t even depend on…

A French pharmacist’s magazine reflected the avant-garde of its day. Mieux Vivre Sara Knelman In January 1936, Jean Bonthoux, a French pharmacist, began publishing Mieux Vivre (Live better), his second monthly arts revue. It joined Bonthoux’s already successful Ciels & Sourires de France (Skies and smiles of France), which also provided the blueprint: hire a well-respected artist as creative director, insist on high production values, invite the best writers and contemporary photographers to contribute content around everyday themes with a wide appeal, and—you might have guessed— incorporate smart, exclusive advertising for new pharmaceutical products. Issues were freely distributed to doctors and other medical professionals for patients to browse, precursors, in their way, to the lifestyle magazines we’re now accustomed to finding in medical offices and waiting rooms. While Ciels traded…

Search the words “Sahara desert tour” or “Morocco fossil holiday” on the Internet and find hundreds of results. Companies like Sahara Tours 4×4, Atlas Geo Tours, and GeoWorld Travel, most based in and around Casablanca and Fez, promise the near-unlimited collection of goniatites, graptolites, trilobites, and other materials from Cretaceous sites. By all accounts, Morocco is open country for mineral and fossil seekers. While laws exist to protect aspects of the nation’s geological and cultural heritage, they are spottily enforced. Fossil tourism, much like the safaris of Eastern Africa, is big business: a ten-day trip can run as much as $3,500 per person, with the promise of collecting and exporting at least sixty pounds of fossils including, but not limited to, Middle Jurassic Period dinosaur bones that are 160 million…

From her intimate portraits of India’s elite to her forensic study of bureaucratic file rooms, Dayanita Singh (b. 1961) has approached photography with the detailed eye of a novelist. Beyond the frame of her austere, atmospheric interiors, landscapes, and character studies, collected since 1986 in twelve monographs, a portal opens onto a narrative at once mysterious and vivid. Singh, who trained in New York as a photojournalist, considers herself a bookmaker, and her reading of experimental fiction and poetry informs her own labyrinthine visual storytelling in highly crafted photobooks and inventive exhibition structures—“portable museums” built to display interconnected visions. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929 I have held on to this book since I was eighteen, the same copy, and it’s my first gift to anyone wishing…

An adventurer turned photographer, Ishikawa Naoki has journeyed from the North Pole to the South Pole using only human-powered vehicles. He is the youngest person ever to have scaled the highest peaks on all seven continents, as well as K2, one of the world’s most hazardous mountains. But Ishikawa, who was born in Tokyo in 1977, doesn’t travel out of a desire to conquer nature—but rather, as he says, in order to relativize his own perspective. For his series Archipelago (2009), made over ten years, Ishikawa traveled around the numerous island chains in the seas to the north and south of Japan. The artist’s twenty-first-century project to reposition Japan—once seen as being on the far edge of the world (“the land where the sun rises”), as one cluster in a…

The actualities and the myths, the facts and the metaphors. Justine Kurland photographs America’s tangled sense of itself. How do we see when seeing has been so anticipated by images? Through the filter of all that has gone before, can a photographer describe lives and places anew? In the last few years Kurland’s pictures have emerged in groupings, with names like This Train Is Bound for Glory and Sincere Auto Care. Gathered here in eloquent sequence is a small sample from her forthcoming book with Aperture. A train snakes like a toy across the desert between Nevada and Utah. The view looks unchanged for decades but those are boxcars of cheap consumables from China, bound for Walmart. The photographer’s son, Casper, a regular companion on these trips, throws back his…