Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2017 från Aperture

We have to learn to read, but looking, for most of us, just happens. So how do we know how to “read” what we see? The history of photography is a matrix of codes and systems devised for drawing out meanings from pictures. It’s hard to think of a discipline without this application: medicine, criminology, advertising, history, art history. Sorting out sincerity from agenda, disinterest from dogma, is part of what keeps images alive. With photography-as-mass-media continuing to accelerate, reading images—as opposed to just looking— is more and more urgent, a critical eye the sharpest counterweapon against seduction. This isn’t a new idea: in his 1931 essay “A Small History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin quotes an anonymous proclamation: “‘The illiteracy of the future … will be ignorance not of reading or writing,…

Kellie Jones: Let’s start with your book, The Notion of Family (2014). Did the popularity of The Notion of Family surprise you, especially given the subject matter? Members of your family have been supportive and willing subjects. Sometimes in such exposés we might feel victimhood. How have you crafted your approach differently? LaToya Ruby Frazier: Initially, when I started The Notion of Family, I knew that I needed to make something on behalf of my relationships with my mother and my grandmother, and something that was for me. Growing up in the 1980s in the Rust Belt in Braddock, Pennsylvania—a time when cities are shrinking, all the factories have been outsourced, all your social services have been cut, the schools are closed, the library is barely functioning—I was already dealing with an invisibility complex.…

Sometimes you need the eyes of an outsider to see your world afresh. The sustained focus of the newcomer; the quizzical glances of the passerby; the cur osity-filled wanderings of the traveler.they refresh our ideas of ourselves and help us rediscover the familiar. Indeed, they even render the invisible visible. Seeing alongside outsiders expands our scope.and, at its best, deepens our understanding and appreciation.by returning us to a childlike inquisitiveness. As the Polishpoet Wis.awa Szymborska wrote, ?gthere are no questions more urgent / than the naive ones.?h Carolyn Drake, who has photographed across the world (notably in western China and the Ukraine), where she benefited from the outsider’s remove, returned in 2013, after seven years away, to her native United States and chose to pursue the naïve questions by adopting…

For Christmas in 2012, Anthony Lepore’s father gave him a section of a bikini factory in eastern Los Angeles—rows eleven to fifteen, to be exact. A few months earlier Lepore had inquired whether his dad might have any surplus space that he and his partner, the artist Michael Henry Hayden, could use for a studio. Real estate in Los Angeles is increasingly expensive but Lepore’s father, whose bikini business has been declining since the 1980s, had more than he needed. At its zenith, the company—founded by Lepore’s grandfather in 1971—employed some three hundred people. Now there are four: seamstresses Lupe, Rosa, and Ligia, and Otilia, who does the finishing. Lepore has known these women for almost all of his life. While the majority of bikinis sold in the United States…

Connecticut was long the center of the North American armaments industry, home to Remington Arms in Bridgeport, Colt’s Patent Firearms in Hartford, and Winchester Repeating Arms (manufacturer of the “gun that won the West”) in New Haven. Colt .45s, Winchester model 1873s, Ruger pistols, Marlin rifles, and Thompson, Browning, and Gatling machine guns all rolled off Connecticut production lines, earning the state the moniker “the arsenal of democracy.” The gun industry is mostly gone, but the factories remain, crumbling just off multiple exits from I-91 and I-95, the two major highways that cut through the state and merge, with a particular force, in the middle of New Haven. Along the state’s rivers other ghosted industries have also left their trace: brass, tobacco, fish, oysters, timber, ships, and clocks. The great…

We have to learn to read, but looking, for most of us, just happens. So how do we know how to “read” what we see? The history of photography is a matrix of codes and systems devised for drawing out meanings from pictures. It’s hard to think of a discipline without this application: medicine, criminology, advertising, history, art history. Sorting out sincerity from agenda, disinterest from dogma, is part of what keeps images alive. With photography-as-mass-media continuing to accelerate, reading images—as opposed to just looking— is more and more urgent, a critical eye the sharpest counterweapon against seduction. This isn’t a new idea: in his 1931 essay “A Small History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin quotes an anonymous proclamation: “‘The illiteracy of the future … will be ignorance not of reading…

Through her celebrated works in photography, video, and writing, Moyra Davey melds literary references—from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jean Genet— with personal histories. Her “mailer” project, made up of letters in the form of photographs, was exhibited at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Her partner, Jason Simon, is a media and documentary artist. He took on the controversial 2002 shuttering of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Stills Archive, and presented both sides of the story in a multifaceted exhibition. Among the links between Davey and Simon is an expansive curiosity about photographs as material objects, evidence, and cultural history. Boyd McDonald Boyd McDonald (1925–1993), editor and publisher of the zine Straight to Hell, made the most eloquent sport of spotting social and sexual hypocrisy in films, watching black-and-white broadcast reruns via…

“I’ve never been able to make a successful picture of Manhattan,” photographer Gregory Halpern says. “It feels like every inch of that island has been claimed.” By contrast, Buffalo, New York, where Halpern has photographed often since 2003, has less than half its peak population. “There’s an emptiness in the landscape that was compelling and intriguing.” He knows whereof he speaks: Halpern was raised in the city. After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, Buffalo grew rapidly as it helped connect the East with an expanding American West. By century’s end it was one of America’s ten largest cities, and played host to the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. (A major celebration of progress and industry in the Americas, the event is remembered today as the site of President…

California’s vaunted highways and bridges make it possible to drive through the state’s vast Central Valley without seeing, or feeling, much of anything. Beneath that infrastructure, nature and humanity are frequently neglected, left to go wild and to improvise. Katy Grannan’s 2016 film The Nine stops to take a long, slow look at a community in one such liminal zone: South Ninth Street in the town of Modesto. Called the Nine by its denizens, it’s a ragtag stretch of residential motels populated by hustlers, addicts, and outcasts. The area abuts the soaring South Ninth Street Bridge, which crosses the majestic Tuolumne River. Underneath is a lush but littered riverbank. Some visit the river to wash off the day; others live there, devising new families; some die there as Jane Does. The people…

“I spent many days of my childhood in my father’s and grandfather’s offices at G. & G. typing nonsense on an old IBM Selectric while a hundred massive machines rumbled and roared in the adjoining shop,” Ginny Levy recalled last year when her family’s company, G. & G. Precision Works, Inc., shuttered. Incorporated in Queens in 1940 and relocated to Ardsley, New York, in 1954, G. & G. initially registered patents for small appliances and electrical signs. During World War II, the company became a subcontractor for Grumman Aerospace Corporation, producing parts for warplanes. When G. & G. closed in 2016, Levy swept through the midcentury office building in search of treasure. “I became fascinated by the artifacts of my family’s and the company’s history,” Levy said, “which so closely…

In the coldest part of 2014, the photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti went to Black River Falls, Wisconsin, for the first time. Using the local paper as her guide, Sanguinetti documented the rituals of small-town life in formal, black-and-white images. It snowed furiously. Her trip to Wisconsin, she now recalls, was like revisiting a place in her mind. “The pictures you’re about to see are of people who were once actually alive.” That stark preamble—at once ominous and weirdly redundant—introduces Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Michael Lesy’s book-length montage of archival photographs and news clippings from Black River Falls at the end of the nineteenth century. The needless reminder that the people depicted in thousands of images by an uncelebrated local photographer named Charles Van Schaick were “once actually alive” somehow makes them all the…

In 1899, Frances Benjamin Johnston was commissioned to photograph the working life of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which had been founded in Hampton, Virginia, after the American Civil War to offer vocational education and practical training to freed slaves and Native Americans. Johnston’s resulting photographs formed part of the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who helped organize the show, disliked separate education for African Americans, especially with its emphasis on manual labor, but he considered Johnston’s work an “especially excellent series of photographs illustrating the Hampton idea of ‘teaching by doing.’” The Museum of Modern Art acquired an album of Johnston’s Hampton prints in 1966, and the following year curator John Szarkowski discussed the…

Their names are Nicanor, Nato, Adrián, Lupita, Victor, Arturo, Antonia, Cristian. Even without the captions, I can tell the photographer knows who they are. They’re not anonymous props in a wild landscape, not statistics, not “others” to be afraid of. The subjects Kathya Maria Landeros captures are above all presented as people, the land presented in context to these individuals. Her camera lets them tell their own stories. Landeros documents with deep familiarity California’s Central Valley and those bound to that land by labor. Millennia before European nations entered the New World, commercial routes were already connecting native communities from ocean to ocean, from the arctic north to the southern tip of Patagonia. The people in these photographs, the descendants of the survivors of conquest, land appropriation, and ethnic cleansing,…

In 1973, a year that marked the beginnings of a national recession and the signing of a peace treaty to end the Vietnam War, Allan Sekula’s first major work took as its subject an aerospace engineer who had been laid off from Lockheed, then the single largest defense contractor in the United States. By combining intimate scenes of family life in a small Los Angeles apartment with various personal documents—family photo albums, a rental agreement, bookshelves filled with classic literature, the engineer’s CV, and job rejection letters—Aerospace Folktales explores the daily life of this unemployed white-collar worker and his family as their class identity is being thrown into question. Sekula then goes on to disrupt the usual objective distance of social observation and documentary politics by revealing that the unemployed…