Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2021 från Aperture

Soft color fields, obscure chemical compositions, hazy space photographs—Anne Hardy’s recent work presents us with evocative photograms that oscillate between the concrete and abstract, between the real and the fantastical. The hard-to-define images move gradually from an inky black to bright hues. Their color palette ranges from cool blue and turquoise tones to warm reds and orange tints, conveying an alternation between coolness and heat, or—as the title of one image suggests—the “rising of heat.” The photograms are based on encounters with light and small objects that Hardy gathered from the foreshore of the River Thames while she was working on her 2019 commission for Tate Britain, The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light. The large-scale, dystopian installation transformed the museum’s neoclassical facade into an abandoned building decorated…

For many people, the late twentieth century marked the end of an era of master narratives. We could no longer take the nightly television newscast as a summary of the day. We realized that the Encyclopedia Britannica excluded as much information as it enclosed between hard covers. Burgeoning Internet access revealed to us people, both across town and across the planet, whose attitudes and actions contradicted our beliefs. After a century and a half of mass media placating viewers, it was once again our responsibility to knit together, from myriad disparate fragments, a coherent story of the world. The Swiss artist Batia Suter, who lives in Amsterdam, has made such efforts a running theme of her expansive and lyrical assemblages of printed pictures for more than twenty years. What was…

Reflecting on the relationship between oral tradition, history, and power, Jim C. Nedd’s work asks how cultural and visual codes, along with mythology and customs, serve as forms of both resistance and belonging. Born in Italy and now residing in Milan, Nedd spent most of his childhood in Colombia. While his mother remained in Europe to support her family back home, Nedd was raised by his relatives in the town of Valledupar. “Even though I had a very strong feeling of being Colombian,” he told me recently, “I knew that there was a place on the other side of the ocean where I somehow belonged as well.” This sense of in-betweenness, from his experience of migration and exposure to different cultures, has defined Nedd’s artistic practice. Nedd combines a documentary…

Thirteen years ago, while touring Buckingham Palace in London, Feng Li became enchanted by a colorful African parrot in one of the drawing rooms. A rush of awe and serenity overtook him—if only he, too, could have such a beautiful bird as a companion. The following year, an identical parrot landed on Li’s balcony in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province, and made his home there. Events such as this led Li, a trained doctor of Chinese medicine who took up photography as a hobby in his twenties, to believe that there is some higher order in the universe. After quitting medicine, Li got a job as a civil servant in local government. Soon, he was taking photographs for the city’s publicity department, recording community events and urban development,…

The afternoon I spoke with Baldwin Lee about his photographs, I thought of Little Richard Specifically, a short clip from a 1973 documentary about Jimi Hendrix, whose early career included a stint in Little Richard’s band. In the clip, Little Richard holds court from a piano bench. He wears a periwinkle-blue jumpsuit. A gray, sequined headband keeps his wild curls at bay, kinda. His face is beat. As the clip opens, Little Richard’s fantastic face and hair fill the frame. He was a star, he says of Jimi. He lifts his hands high and wide as the camera pans out…then lifts his eyes to the ceiling, swivels on the bench, turns back to the interviewer, arms still high: When I got him, he was a star. Sly told you that…

Catherine Opie loves to work. She’s been at it since age six, when she began accompanying her dad to the Ohio family business, OP Craft, on weekends, “earning a penny for every cork I put in a salt or pepper shaker, half a cent for every key chain I put together,” Opie told me recently. A self-described gearhead, she was enthralled by the factory’s machinery, captivated by the process of building things, and enamored of watching her piggy bank grow. By age eight, Opie had set up her own business. Seeing potential in factory waste, she collected it. “I’d sit on our back patio with my little ax and chop reject pieces of basswood, stuff them into recycled paper bags, then go around the neighborhood in the winter with my…

In the introduction to his popular 1980 television series Cosmos, the astronomer Carl Sagan walks along a rocky headland, illuminated by a magic-hour glow, and ruminates on human fascination with the infinite vastness of the universe. The size and age of the cosmos may be beyond our comprehension, he reflects, but we are driven, nonetheless, to contemplate the great mysteries of our origins. Sagan notes that this allure is not just about the awesome and the unknowable—it is also a story about us, a story about people. This isn’t an issue about astronomy, but rather one that explores the desire to better understand the textures of our local universes, the worlds that artists themselves create—from Deana Lawson’s monumental staged portraits tracing cosmologies of the African diaspora to Michael Schmidt’s acute…

An ostensibly endless front of gray fire walls lines up against a leaden sky. Here and there, crooked antennae stick out from rooftops as if trying to establish some type of contact. The mud of the wasteland in front of them is scored with tire tracks. In the foreground, there’s a street: asphalt skirted by a sidewalk. Yet however stringently these lines divide the picture, there’s little to see. The photograph is part of Berlin nach 45 (Berlin after 45), a series showing West Berlin exactly as empty and dreary as it was when the Berlin-born photographer Michael Schmidt made the body of work between 1978 and 1980. The war was still everywhere—both the Cold one and the war before it, with Nazi Germany against the Allied world. Though every…

In Awol Erizku’s Jaheem (2020), an African mask is engulfed by fire, an orange-white burn so totalizing that the lapping flames light the steel-mesh fence against which the object is set. Energizing in every sense, Jaheem is a singular image, but the picture also coheres many of the aesthetics and subjects characteristic of Erizku’s multivalent conceptual photographic practice: Africa and its diaspora; the mystical, the spiritual, and the surreal; creation both natural and cultural. High saturate color. Luminosity. Heat. Fire is not seen but implied in Quotidian Drip (2018–20), the scene bathed in a warm orange, near-red, glow. A still life, the work demonstrates Erizku’s open yet refined embrace of wide-ranging cultural reference points. Leather loafers—one shoe propped up on bricks—meet a Stanley-brand measuring tape, stacks of crisp Benjamins, a…

Our Hmong elders often narrate stories about Laos. In one, they carry bamboo baskets on their backs as they leisurely walk barefoot along the rugged mountainsides toward the rice paddy fields. Idiosyncratically shaped hills embellish the landscape, providing a panoramic view of steep valleys as green as dragon skin. Gibbons frolicking atop banana trees serenade passersby with their melodies, while Asian unicorns prance behind the emerald timbers. In another story, the elders transport us to wartime Laos, where mountains are set ablaze by cluster bombs. Rotting carcasses of water buffalos litter the bomb-stricken landscape. Bloodstained trails zigzag through the compressed jungles as the eyes of trees surveil lost wanderers. In this account, dead men become tigers, the most malevolent of all creatures. The tigers lurk behind bamboo huts, roaring through…

In 2008, after hustling for more than a decade in New York as a fashion photographer, Juan Brenner returned to Guatemala, where he was born in 1977, to devote himself to documenting the country’s history as seen through its resilient population and mountainous geography. His urge to discover and say something new led him to his native country’s Western Highlands, a region whose majestic, earth-exuded energy and Indigenous societies marked by years of oppression and civil war exerted a strong pull on him. “I instantly fell in love with the territory and its people,” he told me. If Brenner’s first documentary project about the Guatemalan Highlands, Tonatiuh (2017–19), fit into a familiar category—a nuanced examination of the trauma and lingering scars of colonization—his latest project entices for different, less orthodox…

As this is written in early spring, Deana Lawson has two exhibitions up in Manhattan, one at the Guggenheim Museum, where she is presenting her show Centropy as the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner, and another at Sikkema Jenkins, her gallery in Chelsea. A third major show is upcoming this fall at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Lawson’s recognition as a profound orchestrator of convulsively charismatic images of Black subjects was inevitable—not least because of her unique depictions of Black folk in domestic spaces in a time of Black pictorial hypervisibility. She has stated that her work “negotiates a knowledge of selfhood through a profoundly corporeal dimension; the photographs speaking to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status may be written, sometimes literally, upon the body.” On…

The opening to the mirror box is a gilded frame through which viewers can watch a kaleidoscopic film. Titled Brave New World (1999)—versions of which have been installed in exhibitions in Washington, D.C., Rome, and New York—the film is “a very simple idea but very effective,” as one viewer says to Theo Eshetu, its creator. You poke your head into the mirror box where the film is playing, and where, given the continuous loop of bisymmetrical clips, you get the illusion of being surrounded by seemingly endless reflections of yourself as you watch. Filmed with a Super 8 camera, the footage is looped together from a thrilling array of sources, including a ceremony of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a commercial for an Italian insurance company, and enchanting images of dancers…

Judith Joy Ross wants to show me her garden. As she throws open the back door to her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a large brown rabbit flashes across the yard, a comet trail vanishing into a maze of plants vivid and green against the gray sky. Ross turns to me, her face bright with excitement, “Did you see that?” I am reminded of a story I had heard, how once, while driving in rural Pennsylvania, Ross had seen something in a kid’s face that caused her to pull the car over abruptly, drag her 8-by-10 camera out of the car, and call after two boys, aged twelve or so. Within moments, as Ross disappeared under the cloth and the boys began to arrange themselves before her lens, the alchemy of…

The objects and ideas that appear in Dionne Lee’s photographs, videos, and collages seem again and again to be involved with the problem of survival and with resistance against the systems of power that order the American landscape. Merging snippets from nineteenth- and twentieth-century nature photographs, Lee is motivated, she says, by the “difficulties of how to survey what is lost, what is stolen, or what was never even allowed to be.” Her collages, often made with gelatin-silver prints and graphite, question how the natural world is wielded in America’s colonial and photographic histories, and how that same history can be reworked to help repair our sense of the present. Soliciting our attention to what is elemental to building a world, the artist’s layerings—of words, hands, twine—suggest how to survive…