Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2019 från Aperture

Gauri Gill Gauri Gill’s series Acts of Appearance (2015–ongoing) shows subjects bedecked in papiermâché masks with depictions as varied as the head of an elephant, the face of the moon, or the screen of a television. While traveling through Rajasthan and Maharashtra, India, Gill discovered the Bahora festival, an annual procession in which performers wear masks representing gods and demons to enact Hindu and tribal epics. She then commissioned two craftsmen, brothers Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, to work alongside community members and create masks that reflect a wider range of everyday characters and emotions. The portraits, which debuted at Documenta 14, in 2017, are the result of Gill’s highly collaborative project. The objective is to “flatten the hierarchy of human experience,” says the curator Anna Lee, who worked with…

Roe Ethridge says his first loves were Lee Friedlander and Andy Warhol. “I’m a photographer, but I’m also an editor,” he has noted. “I’m a colorist. I’m a pictorialist. I’m a commercial photographer.” Ethridge’s images are irreverent amalgams of recirculated and new pictures, equal parts deadpan and evocative—and all the more resonant for their eclectic, Pop art nature. A veteran of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2010, Ethridge has photographed women, flowers, seashells, Coke bottles, apples, pigeons, and the construction site of Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters. For Curriculum, Ethridge chose to toggle between “counterpoint,” things that cut against the grain, and “meanwhile,” ideas that are under the radar. Michelle Wolf Could it be that the extremes of #TimesUp and #MeToo running counter…

How should we live if life is finite? What is our responsibility to our families, our communities, and our environment? How can we practice a secular faith beyond the constraints of institutionalized religion? In his latest book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019), the renowned professor of comparative literature and humanities Martin Hägglund grapples with notions of faith and freedom spanning the work of writers, theorists, and activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to Karl Ove Knausgaard. The meaning of life, he argues, is not found in devotion to eternal existence but instead in caring for what we know will be lost. “Secular faith will always be precarious,” Hägglund writes, “but in its fragility it opens the possibility of our spiritual freedom.” For this issue, Wolfgang Tillmans spoke…

This is the British DJ Danny Rampling talking about the atmosphere in the early days of his nightclub Shoom, in 1988 London, at the start of the acid-house explosion that sent shock waves through U.K. youth culture, and eventually worldwide: “It was very spiritual. Some of those moments in the club were unbelievable. People literally went into trance states, including me. Not from the use of drugs, but from that music and the human energy that was going around [the room]. That’s not something that had happened in Britain for centuries. The feeling in that small space was so intense some nights.” And this is the photographer Dave Swindells talking about that same club: “It was really hot, sweaty and steamy. There was dry ice, strobe lights going off and…

Mare Nero is a publishing platform created by two Italian artists based in Berlin, Federico Gargaglione, a photographer, and Nicola Fucili, an illustrator and tattoo artist. When the two met in Poland, in 2017, they had an immediate connection. The name for their artistic collaboration, meaning “black sea,” comes from Fucili’s description of the waves of dark thoughts that engulf him from time to time. On a more playful note, they liked the fact that the phrase, a refrain from a famous 1970s Italian song by Lucio Battisti, connects them to their country’s pop culture. For A Syrian Gaze (2017), a selection of photographs accompanied by a commissioned soundtrack, they joined with Francesco Del Bravo, a fellow Roman and an archaeologist with an extensive career of research in the Middle…

On August 12, 1962, the song leader Henry Thomas led a protest meeting at St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina, but his performance with a sextet, called the Freedom-tones, didn’t seem to be getting much traction. The meeting’s speakers suggested relocating to a nearby Howard Johnson’s, and that’s when the energy changed. Some five hundred demonstrators from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) bore witness. “Between each speech and prayer, Mr. Thomas started a song,” noted New York Times reporter Robert Shelton. At the segregated restaurant, the singing became more urgent, more charged. A woman named Shirley Thomas participated in the Durham rally. A photograph of her in a pristine white dress and dark beads,…

“Here is definitely a young photographer to watch,” pronounced a glowing profile of Tosh Matsumoto in the April 1947 issue of Popular Photography. For the next decade, Matsumoto’s work would appear in magazines and newspapers, and be presented in six exhibitions overseen by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), including one in the early 1950s featuring photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Yet, following the inclusion of this untitled print—a small, striking photograph depicting undulating stripes on the underside of a peaked tent—in MoMA’s major 1958 exhibition Photographs from the Museum Collection, Matsumoto apparently ceased participation in the art world and, for the rest of his career, made photographs solely for commercial purposes. Prior to his 1944 arrival in New York, Matsumoto had taught himself camera…

“At this time I feel a strong need for the affirmation of spirit in photography in published form,” Minor White wrote to a colleague in 1966. “Aperture is the only place it can possibly be published at this time. Too bad for photography but that is the way it is.” A photographer and influential educator, White also cofounded this magazine and served as its editor from 1952 to 1976. His approach to seeing and making images was deeply informed by a belief in the possibilities of transcendence, by a longing for the metaphysical. More than four decades on, when we asked Wolfgang Tillmans to guest edit an issue, he proposed a theme resonant with this history. “I immediately knew that it should be spirituality,” he says, “because I strongly sense…

If the spiritual, even loosely defined, is a realm beyond the actual, then photography’s relation to it is bound to be complicated. Picturing the spiritual must either go through the actual, or somehow slip around it. In this sense, photography is, like us, straddling the cold facts of immediate existence and loftier ideals. This might be why the spiritual in photography regularly teeters between the sublime and the ridiculous. Strain too hard for metaphor, symbolism, or transcendent feelings, and it can easily fall flat, humiliated for taking on ideas above its station. Forty years ago, the critic Rosalind Krauss called it photography’s “problem of fraudulence.” The most obvious fraudsters were the spirit photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They played the medium’s sobriety against its easy way…

named and unnamed galaxies sensor flaws and dead pixels Empathy can change the world Help without expecting anything in return Then people will feel God’s love The most important hour in your life is the present. The most important person is the one whom you are presently dealing with. And the most important work is love Meister Eckhart, ca. 1300 For reflected light from my skin to be refracted into an image of myself upside down projected onto a sensor / film at the back of your camera. Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions What does it feel like to flex a muscle? What is the movement of a bowel? Where is awareness located in my brain? Can a heart feel itself? What if?…

In October 2004, a few months after a handful of his black-and-white street photographs were presented in an exhibition of South African photography in Tokyo, Santu Mofokeng agreed to meet me at his Johannesburg home. The plan was to pick up on our conversations in Japan, as well as to talk about an image he had recently taken of his older brother Ishmael, which he was showing at a local gallery. Titled Eyes-Wide-Shut, Motouleng Cave, Clarens (2004), the head-and-shoulders portrait presents an aging man, with a graying Colonel Sanders goatee, wrapped in winter clothes. Two figures pass behind him, blurs in the murk of a cave. His eyes, too, are distorted, but it is nonetheless possible to detect a slight deviation in his sight. Ishmael’s right eye peers straight into…

For the artist and educator John Pilson, the film director Stanley Kubrick was “the greatest twentieth-century Jewish comedian (and I’m not just talking Dr. Strangelove) and artist as Cold War psychosexual completist.” It is no surprise that Pilson, whose 1990s photographs from his time working at Merrill Lynch transformed depressed, robotic office drones into clowns of the mundane, is able to laugh with Kubrick, “even at his darkest, especially at his darkest.” The legendary filmmaker was indeed funny, not only in his 1960s comedies—Lolita, Dr. Strangelove—but also at the apex points of his crueler films: the childlike sing-along performed by HAL 9000 as it (he?) deactivates in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the standing ovation Alex DeLarge receives after enduring the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman traumatically beating…

Question: What is spirituality? Krishnamurti: I say it is harmonious living. Now wait a minute. I will explain to you what I mean. You cannot live harmoniously if you are a nationalist. How can you? If you are race-conscious, or class-conscious, how can you live intelligently, supremely, free from that consciousness of class? Or how can you live harmoniously when you are possessive, when there is that idea of mine and yours? Or how can you live intelligently, and therefore harmoniously, if you are bound by beliefs? After all, belief is merely an escape from the present conflict. A man that is in immense conflict with life, wanting to understand, has no belief, he is in the process of experimentation; he does not positively believe and then continue with the…

“A smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity” is how the New York Times described the first-ever image of a black hole, released last April. A staple more of science fiction than of reality, these bizarre objects have a gravitational force that consumes everything around them, including light. Their behavior is so unusual, so logic-defying, that even Albert Einstein doubted their existence. But last spring, a hazy picture of a glowing orange circle was viewed and shared by a billion earthlings, joining a history of epoch-defining photographs that elicit reflection on our place in the cosmos. How did scientists create an image of the strangest of celestial objects at the center of a distant galaxy, fifty-five million light-years away? Peter Galison, a Harvard physicist and historian, worked on the…

7/15 In Feelings Are Facts, the dancer-choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s memoir, she describes an incident that’s always stuck with me. In 1971, during a blue-black period, she tried to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills alongside a slice of banana cream pie. She was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital to have her stomach pumped, and during her recovery a group of her students came and danced Trio A, Rainer’s famously stripped-down, no-eye-contact sequence, in the street outside. I love the idea of that, not just for the sense of care, but the idea that it was healing to show her work back to her, to reintroduce her to herself. Those humble, unemphatic movements, performed on the sidewalk of Twelfth Street, while she—what? Stood by the window three floors up, or…

In the contemporary Thai art world, self-censorship is the norm. With strict lèse-majesté laws and watchful military rule since 2014, artists and curators have become adept at skirting around politically sensitive issues in order to slip under the radar. The state remains uninvolved for the most part. So it came as a surprise when, in the summer of 2017, soldiers stormed a gallery in Bangkok and took photo collages by the then-twenty-two-year-old Harit Srikhao down from the walls. This instance of direct military intervention set a precedent for the recent censorship of artistic expression in Thailand. It was a perfect story for international media outlets: from the backdrop of oppression and turmoil, an iconoclastic, young artist emerges. Reflecting on the events of 2017, Srikhao says, “My work and my identity…