Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2020 från Aperture

Zanele Muholi “I’m calling myself a visual activist,” Zanele Muholi told Aperture in 2015. “That’s my stance as a person, before anything else.” In Muholi’s first major exhibition in the United Kingdom, this visual activism is given due primacy. Featuring approximately 250 works, Tate Modern’s survey will lend special focus to Muholi’s early work, in particular their expansive, subversively tender portrait series Faces and Phases, which they began in 2006. The museum will also delve into South Africa’s Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) archive. Integral to the project is the programming attached to the images: as is their practice, Muholi will stage conversations with the local community about life for LGBTQIA people in South Africa. “It’s not a typical photography exhibition,” says the curator Yasufumi Nakamori. “The exhibition…

To find beauty where others see only emptiness, or junk: that might be one of the artist’s greatest gifts. To bring clear eyes to what the rest of us overlook, and never forget that the same light that shines on the postcard sites of our vacations shines alike on the gas stations and strip malls where we go to make those vacations possible (and fashion our everyday lives). When Robert Adams showed us a deserted drive-in theater screen against Cheyenne Mountain—in his indelible 1974 book, The New West—as well as a stop sign, a cross, and a cluster of flimsy vacation homes set against the majestic landscapes of Colorado, he was not so much diminishing the glory of our wilderness as reminding us of the poignancy, and touching hopefulness, of…

When she landed the commission to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2018, Frida Escobedo established herself as a young architect with a compelling vision. By that time, she already had a number of accomplished projects under her belt, from the renovation of La Tallera, the former studio of the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros turned public art gallery, to Casa Negra, a house featuring wide-screen views of her native Mexico City, designed for a photographer and inspired by the concept of a camera obscura. Escobedo’s works—often made with raw materials like perforated concrete blocks—opt for flexibility and a restrained yet daring form to create simple visual gestures. Though Escobedo says she was too intimidated to apply to art school, deciding on an architecture path instead, her creative process is close to…

This isn’t what I can see from my window. What I can see is a concrete planter full of geraniums and, behind it, a school playground and assorted twenty-first-century towers, one of which, at the Old Street roundabout, turns pink at sunset, a compensation for facing east. The children have just flooded out, their shouts lapping the third-floor balconies. “Where are you going?” “SIT DOWN.” Living in these buildings is a mystery. Sound moves in odd ways. At intervals, a man sings opera, his voice as resonant as if he were standing in the stairwell. The Barbican looks like a fortress, but it’s actually designed on a principle of permeability. There are dozens of ways in and out—staircases, ramps, lifts, walkways, tunnels. Inside each flat, there’s an ingenious row of…

Annabelle Selldorf is the art world’s favorite architect. But her work is nothing if not subtle—rather than the splashy icons we have come to expect from the starchitects long chosen to design art galleries and museums, Selldorf prefers to craft what she modestly calls “functional” settings for art. Rooted in an understated modernist aesthetic, with an updated material palate and innovative geometries, Selldorf’s exhibition spaces have remade the white cube for the twenty-first century. Small wonder, then, that she is frequently sought out to design the homes of high-profile art collectors, or that she has now designed major museums and galleries for over two decades, from the Neue Galerie and the Swiss Institute to David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth. Given her sensitivity to art, it’s not surprising that Selldorf’s…

Ezra Stoller photographed postwar U.S. architecture with the rigor of a true believer. His images—published widely in numerous trade magazines as well as in House Beautiful and House & Garden—presented modernism not as an avant-garde or utopian vision, but as a movement in situ, one born fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s skull. Yet a global war and an ocean unequivocally separate early twentieth-century experiments undertaken at the Bauhaus and by Le Corbusier from the postwar embrace of modern architecture by corporate leaders and the cultural elite in the United States. In Stoller’s crisp, black-and-white prints, boxy-shouldered skyscrapers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s building for Union Carbide (1960), both in New York, proudly rise above the city grid—steel and glass curtain…

For Frederick Kiesler, modernity was all about space-time theory and rubber curtains. In 1933, when the Austro-Hungarian-born architect installed a model for his Space House at the Modernage Furniture Company in New York, he hoped to create “an organic space in space flow.” That meant keeping the noise down with rubber curtains as partitions and rubber lining for the floors of his gently curving, die-cast, fourteen-room prototype. “The house must no longer vegetate as leprosy and warts on the earth’s surface,” Kiesler said, “but must take its place in the world of creations like a crystal, a planet, a fruit, an eye, and muscle.” Kiesler immigrated to New York in 1926 and later taught at Columbia University. He was enthralled by European abstract and Surrealist art, but when it came…

In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot used his new invention to make a photographic image of his own residence, Lacock Abbey, in England, proclaiming it to be “the first instance on record, of a house having painted its own portrait.” Since then, through myriad revolutions in technologies, the forms and goings-on of the domestic realm have remained a preoccupation for photographers, who, like writers, often depict what they know. “I wanted just to show what lay within the houses that were a part of my primary subject, the new western landscape,” says Robert Adams of his austere interiors of suburban housing schemes in the United States. “I also hoped, however, to find evidence of human caring.” Just as photographers have trained their lenses on the built environment, architects have equally…

It began with photographs of Farrah Fawcett. Raymond Donahue, a young showroom decorator for IKEA, had plastered the walls and ceiling of his bedroom in the small New Jersey bungalow he shared with his mother with black-and-white photocopies of Fawcett’s magazine covers: High Society, Vogue, Good Housekeeping. Nest, a new shelter magazine, sent the photographer Jason Schmidt to capture the room, which made the cover of the debut issue, dated Fall 1997. “I love Warhol’s use of repetition, so I photocopied magazine covers and made wallpaper out of them,” Donahue said to the curator Valerie Steele, who conducted the accompanying interview. “Nest offers its own definitions in celebrating human self-invention at home,” Joseph Holtzman wrote in the issue’s Dear Reader letter. “Our focus will never be on focus groups. We’d…

The British writer Rachel Cusk’s celebrated Outline trilogy, published between 2014 and 2018, concerns a series of journeys a writer named Faye takes in Europe. In one, Faye encounters a woman who is obsessed with the works of a painter. “What she was trying to say was that she wasn’t interested in them objectively, as art,” Cusk writes. “They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see.” A recent spate of well-regarded novels has taken the use of photographs in book jacket design into new territory, structuring a relationship between word and image. The U.K. Faber and the U.S. Picador editions of Cusk’s trilogy, designed by Rodrigo Corral, make use of still lifes by the fashion photographer Charlie Engman. The thick white border and the…

In the course of the nearly thirty years of his practice, Sir David Adjaye’s projects have been realized on five continents. They include cultural and historical landmarks—such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., and the planned Holocaust Memorial, in London—and sites that show the possibilities of civic engagement, such as the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO and the new building for the Studio Museum in Harlem. His practice, based in New York, London, and Accra, is like a body, he says, “implanting itself globally across many geographies.” During a recent conversation with the writer Emmanuel Iduma, Adjaye was most impassioned when he spoke of drastic changes ahead, in which cities of the future will be increasingly brutal. He has the credentials to make…

The photographer Alejandro Cartagena knows you want to go home. You yearn for a house that really feels like home—an affordable space of serenity or happy chaos, with easy access to work, clean air, and clean water. Where you can become fully human and maybe raise a family. Not a site of destruction or pollution. Not a place that will bankrupt you or pen you in or poison you. Home. The failure of the world’s metropolitan areas to fulfill this dream for all of its residents drives Cartagena’s work. Cartagena, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1977 and now lives in Monterrey, Mexico, has photographed Mexican suburban architecture and its housing-challenged inhabitants for the past fourteen years. His images of cheap structures and exhausted commuters critique the international…

Two years ago, on his annual visit to Japan, the photographer Fumi Ishino started feeling that things were a little bit off. Perhaps it was the billboards gearing up for the 2020 Olympics. Perhaps it was the advertisements trumpeting a Cool Japan. Whatever it was, fifteen years after his move to the United States for college, he walked around neighborhoods of Tokyo with his camera, followed by a feeling that the place was suddenly neither home nor foreign. It was a feeling of zure, he said, of slippage, and he repeated the word softly. A feeling of zure, lopsidedness: a frame on the wall ever so slightly crooked. This slight but powerful sense of unease suffuses Ishino’s images, that of witnessing the familiar transform into the strange. Ishino, born in…

It’s called the “tattooed villa.” On the tip of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on a peninsula of the French Riviera, sits the Villa Santo Sospir, once the home of the socialite Francine Weisweiller. One evening in 1950, while staying at the house, Jean Cocteau offered to draw the head of Apollo on the wall over the fireplace in the salon. Before long, Cocteau was covering the whole house in mythological frescoes, letting his whimsical yet controlled line wander where it would, across walls, doors, and even lampshades, covering some with rich, fantastical images and colors. Over twelve years, Cocteau embellished the surfaces of the house, “tattooing” it, in his words. Photographs from the period show him balanced between two ladders, with his charcoal at the end of a long stick, like Michelangelo in…

In her 1907 Art Nouveau home on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the architect Denise Scott Brown lives among an eclectic collection of art, furniture, and knickknacks. As in her iconic designs and writings, elements of vernacular culture mix freely with classical references. Batman pillows converse with a Piranesi etching. Born and raised in South Africa, Scott Brown arrived in the United States in 1958 following extensive travel in Europe. She and her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, came to study with the architect Louis Kahn, bringing with them a strong commitment to urban planning that has informed her designs, teaching, and writing ever since. As a professor at UC Berkeley and UCLA in the mid-1960s, she became interested in the rapidly growing cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In…