Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2017 från Aperture

Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery Organized by Iwona Blazwick, the first major London retrospective of Thomas Ruff’s work features more than a dozen of the German photographer’s series, spanning from the 1970s to the present. Investigations of portraits, machines, and surveillance are seen in some series, while others allude to the current political climate in their explorations of the role of press photography. The early 1990s Newspaper Photographs separates archival news images from their context, while Ruff’s recent work in press++ focuses on editorial and crop markings on photographs taken from decades of American newspapers. Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery, London, September 27, 2017–January 21, 2018 Nicholas Nixon at the ICA, Boston In large-format, yet intimately scaled blackand- white photographs, Nicholas Nixon has documented his wife and her three sisters since 1975, in four…

In the early 1970s, in New York, Peter Hujar shuttered the commercial studio on Madison Square he’d been operating for a few years, moved into the East Village loft he would call home for the rest of his life, and turned his back on the hustle of fashion photography. Hujar’s enduring status as an underground art star is owed to what he called his “personal work,” which consumed him from then until his death in 1987—in particular, portraits of the famous and infamous among his generation of artists based downtown (which, by some counts, was the last). But to associate Hujar only with portraits is to miss out on an oeuvre of great depth and variety. Rather than being a portraitist who did other work besides, he was a well-rounded…

Matthew Higgs: I am going to start with a quote you put on your Instagram feed. It says: “For anyone who wonders why I wanted to make fashion pictures, now you know.” And there is the hashtag #humanityvisibilityequalspower. What animated that? I think it’s worth mentioning that this conversation is taking place two days after Trump’s executive order on immigration. Collier Schorr: For me, Instagram is a dual platform for showing your work and for showing what you stand for. The picture I made for Saint Laurent, which accompanied the post, was more typical of a documentary picture than a fashion advertisement. Any one element could be seen as typical, but the models were styled and encouraged to perform and play outside of what is traditionally seen: heteronormal women. We…

It all began in front of the camera. In 2012, the French photography duo Jalan and Jibril Durimel created their streetstyle Tumblr Durimel. The blog announced the then eighteenyear- old twins to the world as a creative pair who ran around the streets of Paris taking pictures of themselves in the latest trends. They gained a following. Later that year, when they settled in Los Angeles for college, the twin brothers began modeling in campaigns for American Apparel, AXS Folk Technology, and Union Los Angeles, and made an appearance in the Japanese style tome Popeye. As models, Durimel became frustrated by the contemporary reality that the commercial fashion image is dominated by trends and a brand’s ability to advertise a closeness to wealth, power, and idealized notions of beauty and…

Visiting the photographer Walter Pfeiffer in his studio in Zurich, you find an orderly space, painted white, possessing the trappings of a typical design studio: swivel chairs, Pantone pens, and a white Formica tabletop on trestles. Yet, lining the walls are exquisitely arranged mood boards, wrapping paper, photographs, posters, plastic props, and a Technicolor cornucopia of cascading bolts of cloth. Early in his career, Pfeiffer was a window dresser for a department store, where he learned the skills of arrangement. Today, he still employs this way of working to test environments and themes for commissions, as if he always has the shopwindow in mind. Now in his early seventies, Pfeiffer has never been in greater demand. His photographs are exhibited and published worldwide, and he continues to work commercially, represented…

Olgaç Bozalp’s photographs are like Georges Simenon novels. They feature characters who appear to hold many secrets: one wonders whether they are what they seem. In his fashion shoot Manufactured Self (2016), Bozalp’s subjects wander along corridors of a London school in varying poses of distress. In Misfits (2017), a group of young men wear garments too loose for their bodies. These discrepancies between clothes and skin, and between the way Bozalp’s characters self-represent and the photographer’s presentation of them, result in delicious instances of awkwardness that turn those uneasy figures into mysteries. For Bozalp, the rift between how we present ourselves and how we are perceived by others hits close to home. When he traveled to Istanbul last year for a Gucci commission, Bozalp was aware of his reputation…

Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery Organized by Iwona Blazwick, the first major London retrospective of Thomas Ruff’s work features more than a dozen of the German photographer’s series, spanning from the 1970s to the present. Investigations of portraits, machines, and surveillance are seen in some series, while others allude to the current political climate in their explorations of the role of press photography. The early 1990s Newspaper Photographs separates archival news images from their context, while Ruff’s recent work in press++ focuses on editorial and crop markings on photographs taken from decades of American newspapers. Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery, London, September 27, 2017–January 21, 2018 Nicholas Nixon at the ICA, Boston In large-format, yet intimately scaled blackand- white photographs, Nicholas Nixon has documented his wife and her three sisters…

Mark Steinmetz, Athens, Georgia (girl on hood of car), 1996 Athens, Georgia (girl on hood of car) exhibits the masterful simplicity and perfect formal balance of Mark Steinmetz’s work. Evoking a tone of quiet longing and loneliness, the image presents a pale teenage girl reclining against the windshield of a nondescript car, illuminated by what appears to be a streetlamp in a shopping-center parking lot. Steinmetz renders an everyday act as an arresting moment of extraordinary beauty and grace. The girl is lost in space. The Five Movements dance from The OA The through line in The OA often seems almost too absurd to continue watching, but nonetheless the storytelling is beguiling and captivating from its first scene. Ultimately, the series delivers an unforgettable payoff: a scene where five motley…

If you somehow manage to make it all the way to the northern tip of Cape Cod, as far as you can go, really, on Route 6 before falling straight into the Atlantic Ocean, you’ll eventually reach Provincetown. It was once a New England fishing and whaling village; as the industry collapsed over a century ago, it slowly evolved into a welcoming artists’ community. After the Greenwich Village artists and writers arrived in the 1910s, followed by the hippies in the 1960s, Provincetown became a gay mecca, where rainbow flags fly proudly over Commercial Street and drag queens in glitter platforms stroll to the dairy parlor for an afternoon milkshake. Being there can feel like standing at the very end of the earth, nothing in sight but the harbor, which…

I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues. —Richard Avedon Who was Van Leo? The question haunts anyone who sets out to write about him. He left behind so much for us to admire. And yet he gave us so very little. Of himself, I mean. So many unanswered questions loom. The temptation to fill the gaping holes is huge. Was he a pioneering modernist, one of the most questing and idiosyncratic photographers the Middle East has known? A man-boy narcissist whose greatest quirk was to close his studio for a few hours each day to snap photographs of himself? A savvy technician with an outsize passion for Hollywood-tinged glamour? An oriental orientalist? When he passed away, in 2002, at the age of eighty, the…

“There is a saying: ‘Make one picture for “them” and another for yourself,’” Collier Schorr remarks in this issue. But, she adds, “Slowly try to make them want the pictures that you want.” Schorr is referring to her insistence on expanding the spectrum of desire seen in commercial fashion advertising, notably through her recent campaign for Saint Laurent, which cast queer women of color. Attuned to how the media images that populate our daily lives shape our vision of who we are—and who we might become—Schorr wants to remake that pictorial landscape. “When I first started making art,” she says, “I wanted to essentially make a billboard in a gallery that talked about visibility and representation at a time when there was no real lesbian representation in the art world.”…

These piercing images, locked away in a small box in Harlem, represent a history that I had never learned. Everyone knows the phrase “Black is beautiful,” but very few have heard of the man who helped to popularize it. Brooklyn-born black photographer Kwame Brathwaite has lived most of his life behind the camera, devoted to capturing the lives of others on film. Spending much of the 1960s in his tiny darkroom in Harlem, he perfected a processing technique that made black skin pop in a photograph, with a life and energy as complex as that decade. Known by friends and comrades as the “Keeper of the Images,” Brathwaite has logged thousands of hours in the darkroom, dipping his fingers into harsh developing chemicals so often over the decades that the…

Although Helga Paris, born 1938 in Pomerania, was self-taught and more interested in amateur photography than in so-called fine art photography, a friend suggested she work professionally after he saw a picture she had taken of her two kids. In 1967, she followed his advice. She had finished her degree in fashion design in East Berlin right before the Berlin Wall was built and was working in the textile industry and teaching costume design, yet eventually became frustrated with the constraints of these fields; the rigid standardizations of East Germany’s planned economy didn’t offer much creative leeway. Paris then took a job as a photographer’s assistant and began to explore her neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, capturing its inhabitants and street scenes in melancholic images. In a recent conversation, Paris, now seventy-nine…

For Buck Ellison, a California-based photographer who stages deadpan, meticulously stylized pictures of people in elite, banal-seeming scenarios, privilege is defined in minute details and practically unseen movements. Elise Silver, a model cast in Oh (2015), a study of innocuous teenage expression, will be recognizable to those who have seen her as a glamorous figure in luxury car advertisements. In Untitled (Cars) (2008), when Ellison ventures into the world of automobiles, two Land Rovers are parked at ridiculously steep angles. It captures a dealership’s demonstration of the vehicles’ rugged capabilities—cartoonishly tough, masculine, expensive. At closer glance, one of the cars bears a vanity license plate reading MARIN, the name of the Northern California county where Ellison was raised, one of the most affluent in the country. Growing up, Ellison says,…

Gong Yining, a design student at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, changes her style in the same way one might switch skins in a role-playing game. Wearing a blouse with a mandarin collar in brilliant red and matching red lipstick, she’s adamant that it’s all just appearances anyway. Chinese millennials of Gong’s age have been shaped by the growth of market forces in China. Born in the 1980s and 1990s, at the beginning of communist leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” program, they’ve seen the whole social structure of China change as the country lurched from a planned economy to a socialist market model. “When I was still a child, the standard of success for a family patriarch was whether he dared to participate in the emergence of…