Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2020 från Aperture

“In nature, nothing is perfect.… Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” —Alice Walker Two bare-chested young Black men on playground swings. Staring slightly down at the camera, the first young man, with twisted hair and striped boxers peeking out of his jeans, clasps the swing’s chains. Next to him, another young man, swinging in his ripped denim, with his eyes closed. His hands grab the chains in preparation for flight or, perhaps, a return to rest. n Tyler Mitchell’s photobook I Can Make You Feel Good (2020), a debut monograph based on his first solo exhibition at Foam, in Amsterdam, in 2019, and at the International Center of Photography, in New York, in 2020, the depiction of these young men, partly naturally lit and…

High above a parking lot spins a fragment of a Ferris wheel. Across the blue waves of a postcard-perfect sea, an elaborate railing forms a row of overhead portholes. In the Greek Armenian artist Aikaterini Gegisian’s collages, contemporary artifacts from the Russian city of Vladikavkaz are layered over photographs from Soviet-era archives in order, she says, to “visually articulate the idea of post-Soviet transition.” To conduct research for The Suspended Real (2013), she went to the national library of North Ossetia–Alania, in southwestern Russia, unearthing images that would allow her to point implicitly to the way these photographs participated in building what the artist describes as “local national narratives” that wed Soviet ideology to motifs of progress and natural beauty. But in addition to their serious political critique, Gegisian’s collages…

Gregory Halpern Gregory Halpern’s latest solo exhibition and photobook take their title, Let the Sun Beheaded Be, from the 1948 collection of surrealist poems Soleil cou coupé by the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire. A poetic thread is woven throughout the series, which was made during a 2019 residency in Guadeloupe and presented in 2020 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. In images taken over the course of three trips to the islands, Halpern plumbs the violent resonances of French imperialism and the slave trade by turning his eye to Guadeloupe’s residents, landscapes, and commemorative structures. He does not explicate the region’s history but rather photographs it askance, catching the fading details of a wall engraving or a soot-stained marble bust. Throughout, Halpern’s dreamy, verdant color palette is…

It was less than a century after Thomas More’s beheading that the adjective utopian became shorthand for naive or outlandish aspirations. That is a shame. Far from being impractical, the utopian imagination is a sharp-edged tool for comprehending the world and its discontents. Like certain photographs, visions of utopia offer a glimpse beyond the all-eclipsing present, revealing possibilities obscured by the torrent of daily life. Early dreams of utopia were wrapped up in fantasies of distant, unknown lands. Following the format laid down by More in 1516, most literary utopias were travelogues: fictional voyages to some hidden Shangri-La where people had finally figured out how to live in harmony. When the utopian imagination began to run out of blank space on the map (not that there had ever been any),…

In Lorna Simpson’s Earth & Sky 2 (2018), part of a series of collaged portraits of Black women that Simpson has been making for a decade, a constellation glides in streaks and waves from a woman’s head. The subject looks straight out of the frame, one hand poised as if about to relay an important message from the stars. In other images from the series, uncut geological specimens—of asphalt and amber, garnet and malachite—adorn women as magnificent crowns and gowns; in one, a perfect bubble floats, inviolable, above a young, modish face. Galactic, regal, and elemental by turn, Simpson’s subjects appear out of time, their serene expressions foils for exuberant coifs, expansive imaginations, even glints of premonition. What future might they portend? Simpson propels forward through the past, splicing her…

It is the picture of rebirth, an image of the unease of transition. Profusely the sweat gathers, beading across Prince Luxury’s face and chest. His almond-shaped eyes are shut as his tongue reaches across gold grills capped onto his teeth, licking away moisture from his upper lip. His body is there in the frame, but his mind is elsewhere. Looking at the artist Shikeith’s image titled Prince (2019), you want to see what the figure sees, but you can’t. Luxury’s gaze is hidden behind his eyelids; like an awning, they provide cover. What vision is he masking? An action of his own making? An imagined destination where the sweat of his labor marks him of value? A place where he is the center of his own desire? Of this image,…

In May 1803, a slave ship bound for St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, neared its final destination. On board were seventy-five captives belonging to the Igbo peoples of West Africa. As the ship approached the island, the Igbo rose up in revolt, forcing the white crew to jump overboard, running the vessel aground. On land, according to a contemporary account, the Igbos “took to the swamp.” Rather than risk being returned to captivity, they lined up hand in hand and walked into the water where many of them drowned. Variations on the story of the Africans who found liberation through suicide have been told over successive generations across the Atlantic world, from the United States to South America and the Caribbean. In the process, the tale has…

In the early 1980s, when Koto Bolofo made his first pictures for British Vogue, he worked night shifts at a West London supermarket. On set, he kept mum about his day job. “You had to have this pretense—‘Daddy’s quite rich,’” Bolofo says, wryly. “To say you worked in a supermarket would be unheard of. It would still be unheard of.” Bolofo arrived in the United Kingdom in October 1970, aged eleven, a refugee from South Africa, and found himself living in a rough London council estate, full of “skinheads and racism.” At Ealing College of Higher Education, where a few years later Bolofo began studying art, resources were scant, so students passed a camera around as a group, trying to remember whose frame was whose. He spent all his time…

The year 2020—that number suggests a kind of harmonious symmetry, promising clarity of sight. Yet this year has been numbingly askew. A sense of dystopian madness emerged on multiple fronts: a pandemic that preyed on the most vulnerable, a historic economic crisis that followed in its wake, a drumbeat of violence that painfully reminded us of the racism and inequality that undergird daily life, an election in the United States that posed divergent understandings of reality. Commentators fumble to reference history’s loudest ruptures: Have we experienced a parallel to 1918 or to 1968? What will this transformative time portend for the future? If 2020 has resembled a disquieting sci-fi plot, a sinister speculative work, a cautionary tale from which we might extract some lessons on what to avoid, on how…

For more than a decade, the filmmaker Matt Wolf has won acclaim for his meticulously crafted documentaries that reveal lost histories through deep dives into media archives. His focus is often on radical outsiders whose projects range from the quixotic to the paranoiac. His first film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), is an exploration of the life and work of an avant-garde cellist and disco producer, while Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019) examines the fascinating obsession of its subject, who recorded live television news continuously from 1979 until her death in 2012. Wolf’s latest film, Spaceship Earth (2020), traces the activities of a counterculture collective known as the Synergists from the 1969 founding of a sustainable ranch in New Mexico through the 1991 launch of Biosphere…

Planned to stretch higher than the Eiffel Tower, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920) projected the utopian ambitions of the Bolsheviks and Constructivists alike. Its intertwined iron spirals were to contain three spinning glass structures housing the headquarters for the Soviet-led world revolution. Communist radio was to be broadcast from the top, and agitational slogans were to be projected onto surrounding clouds. These dreams never came to fruition, but they found an echo in the steel diagrid of Moscow’s Shukhov Radio Tower, built between 1919 and 1922, and immortalized in a series of 1929 photographs by Aleksandr Rodchenko. Here, too, in one of the best-known images of the series, abstract form serves to remake society, though the guard and his bayonet blade add an ominous undertone even as…

Where can people of the Latinx community feel safe? After the history of colonialization and the experience of migration, how can we express a complex sense of spirituality in the United States? How can image making become ritual and serve our spirits? How can we create visual representations of a place of our own—a utopia? For people of marginalized communities, engaging in spirituality and imagining utopias for ourselves are not only instinctual processes but ways of survival. Learning from their grandmothers, who were guided by their grandmothers, many Latinx artists have used passed-down spiritual practices, often an amalgamation of Indigenous, African, and European beliefs and customs, to make striking and powerful portraits in recent years. Their work is all the more urgent after a year in which the U.S. was…

At the center of any spiritual life lie clarity, simplicity, and devotion. We may see and hear the members of, say, the Hare Krishna movement parading through our streets in a jangle of bells and dance, and that seems a vibrant expression of their gratitude, their sense of community, the love they share. But at the heart of every individual life is what happens in silence and solitude, when nobody else is around and one can focus so undistractedly on a single point that the world explodes into color. Every time I look at Balarama Heller’s work from his 2019 series Sacred Place, I’m pierced by something as haunting as a single plucked note in the dark. It’s as if he’s freed the inner life of all its clutter and…