Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2017 från Aperture

Family Pictures When Roy DeCarava set out in mid-twentiethcentury Harlem to undertake what would become the landmark photobook The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), he employed photography as “a creative expression to meditate on everyday life and family,” says Drew Sawyer, head of exhibitions and curator of photography at the Columbus Museum of Art. The artists featured in the exhibition Family Pictures—LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Carrie Mae Weems, John Edmonds, and Gordon Parks among them—work in a similar vein, pushing against traditional notions of documentary photography in radical and intimate depictions of domestic life. Family Pictures at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, February 16–May 20, 2018 Susan Meiselas The upcoming retrospective of Susan Meiselas’s work, a coproduction of Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona,…

In 1952, the New York Daily News published a front-page story that stopped the world in its tracks: “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty.” George Jorgensen, Jr., from New York, had traveled to Denmark for sex reassignment surgery and returned—elegant, poised, and triumphant—as Christine Jorgensen. She was the first transsexual the general public had ever known, and pictures of her arrival at Idlewild Airport appeared in newspapers across the globe. Jorgensen explained that she had grown up feeling like “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” In interviews, when asked about her sudden media popularity, she said knowingly: “I guess they all want to take a peek.” It would be another half century before transgender consciousness evolved beyond the public’s perception of Christine Jorgensen as a cultural novelty. Certainly, news of her…

Gender and sexuality are multivalent, a spectrum of intersecting identities. This year is the twentieth anniversary of Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. In 1995, an exhibition proposal I submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts received one of the last exhibition grants to be awarded before the NEA was gutted by right-wing Republicans as part of the culture wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Two years later, in 1997, the exhibition opened in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and then traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. On the cover of its catalog is the gender-bending Surrealist artist and writer Claude Cahun. The title, Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose, combines the first name of Marcel…

Reports of the death of downtown have been greatly exaggerated. Every week, creative renegades of eighteen or twenty or twentyfive flock to New York—outcasts in their hometowns, seeking a place to belong. Not long ago, Ethan James Green was one of them; he then became one of their more stylish chroniclers. “I just feel more calm when I’m with those kids,” the now twentyseven- year-old Green says of his subjects, emissaries from a generation that has bushwhacked new expanses of gender diversity. “I found the people that I can relate to, being a weirdo back home, and then coming here, and then meeting all these people and realizing, Oh, my God, you were there and I was here, looking and dreaming about the same things.” Green grew up in Caledonia,…

“All drag queens want is love,” says Sabrina at the beginning of Frank Simon’s 1968 documentary The Queen. Following a group of drag performers and trans women preparing for the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant at Town Hall, in New York, Simon’s film charts the lengths to which they go to attain adoration. The pageant emcee, a drag queen and gender pioneer later known as Flawless Sabrina, was only in her twenties when The Queen was made. The opening shots, reproduced on the film’s poster, portray Sabrina’s ritual of getting cameraready— applying makeup and wigs, and donning glorious dresses. It’s a transformation not only of man to woman, but of anonymous citizen to fierce performer. Despite lacking any sexual content, The Queen was X-rated upon release, restricting where and…

The cure to pimples is apparently all about apple cider vinegar, coconut oil, vitamin E, and vitamin B. I’ve never tried it, but there’s something sisterly about how earnestly this concoction is offered up at the end of Cookie Mueller’s How to Get Rid of Pimples (1984). Published in the series Top Stories, the book feels part Village Voice classified ad, part John Waters movie, and part punk takedown of 1950s women’s magazines. Top Stories stopped publishing in 1991, and the New York of low-rent downtown walk-ups with glamorous tenants that the book conjures is long gone, but How to Get Rid of Pimples remains a classic of underground New York. Top Stories was edited by photographer Anne Turyn. The series started in 1979 at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in…

“Photography saved my life,” says Zackary Drucker, the guest editor of this issue of Aperture. As an artist, trans activist, and producer of the acclaimed Amazon series Transparent, Drucker has spent her career investigating the manifold intersections of images and identity, but her grasp of photography’s transformative power was formed early on. “As an adolescent, I discovered that by taking a Polaroid picture of myself dressed as a girl, I could escape the confines of boyhood. I have continued to use photography as a way to verify my existence and to see myself, my relationships, my evolution.” When we asked Drucker to guest edit this issue, she set out to put the “transgender tipping point”—marked by the visibility of public figures including Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner— in context. Drucker…

Over a decade ago, when searching for a classic design for my next tattoo, I came across an image that startled me. A well-known 1950s British tattoo artist sat with his shirt off, a tattoo of a bullfight on his chest, and other tattoo artists were arrayed behind him. It is a conventional tattoo parlor photograph—layering messages of masculinity, muscularity, symbol, art, and body all in celebration of the moment when art meets flesh at the end of the tattoo gun. But there are other signifying systems in the photograph that most viewers would see but ignore. On the seated man’s chest, below his crude but classic tattoo of a bull being struck by a matador, are faint scars. They sit below the pectoral muscles and outline the lower chest.…

Since her searing debut at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, Catherine Opie has deployed photography to make the LGBT community visible. At times, she has focused on S&M practices—her signature Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) will still make some viewers wince. Opie, though, insists that she not be defined by a single identity; her gaze is generous. Over the years, she has photographed the sinewy forms of Los Angeles highways, young surfers and football players, quaint ice-fishing houses—a catholic output of Americana that defies easy categorization. For The Modernist (2017), a new short film made of still images, Opie has cast her longtime friend and photographic subject, Stosh Fila, also known as Pig Pen, as a person who seeks to burn down some of the most important modernist houses in Los Angeles, destroying what…

When she first moved to Chicago nine years ago, as an MFA candidate at Columbia College, the photographer Natalie Krick was intent on making what she describes as “deceptive portraits.” “I was interested in how the body was rendered through artifice,” she told me recently from Seattle, where she now lives and works. “I was interested in how I could style people and make them up. Their gender would become ambiguous, with so much ‘femininity’ applied onto them.” Krick placed ads for potential models on Craigslist and showed up at the apartments of strangers, laden with bags of clothes and beauty products. The process resembled something in between a fashion shoot and a blind date, inherently awkward and immediately intimate. “I’d meet them for the first time and give them…

Kate Bornstein is a gender outlaw. Decades before Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, Bornstein was pushing for a radical vision of gender beyond the binary. In 1989, with daytime talk shows among the only mainstream arenas to address nonnormative identities, she appeared on Geraldo in a segment titled “Transsexual Regrets: Who’s Sorry Now?” The show was meant to sensationalize Bornstein, a transgender lesbian, but she wasn’t having it. “I was the one who wasn’t sorry,” she later said. In her performances and plays, such as Hidden: A Gender (1989), and in her groundbreaking, genre-defying 1994 book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, Bornstein writes with characteristic wit, candor, and generosity about topics from gender confirmation surgery to trans activism. Throughout her life and…

The casual, personal photographs that Marlow and her friends captured are enchanting for their joy and intimacy. Had you been in Europe during the 1970s, you might have been entranced by an exotic girl, in a darkly lit bar, drenched in blood-red ostrich feathers. Marlow La Fantastique gave shows from Hamburg to Berlin, then throughout towns in Italy and France. She was American, and everyone said she looked like Josephine Baker. Most assumed that she’d come to Europe from Jamaica, or another island in the Caribbean. “Wherever they said I was from, I said, ‘Yes,’” Marlow, now seventy-five years old, recalled recently, sitting in her Chicago apartment. “I knew not to argue.” When she contacted me in 2014, I was elated to learn that Marlow, whose image I had come…

On the surface, Josué Azor’s recent photographs are heirlooms of a group’s expressions of joy. Upon closer look, however, these photographs also provide a telling glimpse into the coping mechanisms of the Haitian LGBT community, which has long endured the torment of social ridicule and religious prohibition. Uniquely, Azor portrays a certain form of revelry that has traditionally evaded photography in Haiti: the nonconformist, nonprescriptive nightlifers whom he refers to as “the Noctambules.” Since the earthquake of January 12, 2010, conservative Christians have had a significant impact on the sociopolitical life of Haiti through various movements to persecute homosexuals and practitioners of vodun. While vodun is routinely characterized in a negative light, it is welcomed and practiced by some members of the LGBT community. Azor’s work has covered its ceremonies,…

Every year, the eighteen-day festival of Aravan, based upon a myth from the legendary Hindu epic the Mahabharata, sees thousands of members of the transgender community gather in the Indian village of Koovagam in Tamil Nadu. The rituals begin just as theatrically as they end: with a reenactment of the marriage of Lord Krishna (in the female form of Mohini) to the warrior Aravan, followed by a mourning ceremony in which Krishna/Mohini is widowed when Aravan is killed. While daytime has more of a spiritual and communal tone to it, night transforms the village streets and fields into a rare safe space of sexual and social freedom. In 2016, Nick Sethi, a New York–based photographer of Indian descent, spent five days immersing himself in this dualistic setting. Having previously witnessed…

Kiev between dusk and dawn. The city has gone to sleep, but in its brutalist buildings, nightclubs, parks, and alleys a new scene is coming to life. I first visited the Ukrainian capital thirteen years ago, in 2004. The Orange Revolution had just toppled the unpopular authoritarian post-Soviet regime. Tents and makeshift kitchens were erected in the streets, and old women brought pots of jam for the young revolutionaries. Although rumors about tanks and saboteurs continued to spread fear, the people danced, and the newfound freedom was as tangible as the mud underfoot. The energy was electrifying. But the revolution ended. A liberal government came to power but soon succumbed to corruption, division, and waning popular support. In 2014, a second revolution led to the separation of eastern Ukraine and…