Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2024 från Aperture

VINCE ALETTI (“The Theater of Paul Kooiker,” page 132), the former art editor and photography critic at the Village Voice, wrote weekly photo exhibition reviews for the New Yorker from 2005 to 2016 and now contributes to the magazine’s online Photo Booth feature. In 2019, he published Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines. His book The Drawer (2022) was named the Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook of the Year in 2023. THESSALY LA FORCE (“Coreen Simpson: Past Lives,” page 110) is a writer based in New York. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications. She recently published a short story in the book Five Stories for Philip Guston (2023). OLIVIA LAING (“Endnote,”…

Early in the BBC documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (2023), a powerful collection of personal testimonies on the Troubles, one speaker recalls his childhood excitement during the first waves of civil unrest. “It was mad … it was like a movie,” he reminisces, thinking back on the innocent elation he experienced as mass protests, running street battles, and military patrols became regular features of everyday life. Inevitably, as the daily drama intensified, with bombings, shootings, and funerals dominating the headlines, the desperate gravity of the situation became clear. Even to kids playing with pretend guns on the backstreets of Derry and Belfast, as the BBC interviewee remembers, “this was serious … it wasn’t like a movie anymore.” The Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura first visited Northern Ireland…

In her poem “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde speaks of the precarious experience of living with the knowledge that one’s survival is not only not guaranteed but actively, purposefully threatened. Avion Pearce borrowed a line from Lorde for the title of their series In the Hours Between Dawn (2022–24), an ode to the possibilities of the midnight hours. The experience of the queer and trans community of color in Brooklyn that Pearce photographs is a testament to Lorde’s words. Survival—half shrouded, yet insistent—can appear in forms both soft and strong. Pearce, who works with 8-by-10 and medium-format cameras, considers how photography shapes ideas about identity and history. “I was looking at some of the tools that have been used to construct these ideas,” Pearce told me recently, describing their…

Of all the epithets coined by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s opponents to describe his monumental redevelopment plan for the seat of state government in Albany—and there were many, ranging from “Nelson’s Pyramid” to “Rocky’s Edifice Complex” to an array of creative if mostly unprintable plays on the resonance between his notorious penchant for philandering and the primordial symbolism of a nice big tower—the one that must have stung the most was “Brasília North.” This was not just a riff on the governor’s pharaonic ambition, or a dig at his Freudian drive to outdo a father who, after putting the family name on Rockefeller Center, had become the most famous developer in the world. It was a statement of fact: the Albany project really was inspired in part by the…

IMAGINE HAVING LOST A LOVED one in the New England of the 1870s. Then, a knock at your door: a salesman in a suit. He pulls out a bound catalog of albumen-silver prints, with as many photographs in it as you’ve maybe seen in a lifetime, each showing a tombstone ready to memorialize your loss. The trade catalog for the Vermont Marble Companies offers a purchase for your grief, documentation that something exists in the here and now to honor those in the hereafter. This is an example of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s research assistant Virginia McBride calls “the truth claim of photography,” a way companies used the supposed veracity of photographic images to convince customers they would deliver what they promised. It’s an early highlight of a…

For all their polish, there’s something about Paul Kooiker’s pictures that feels outsider, something obsessive and off. Even when he’s photographing ordinary subjects—an egg, a wig, a shoe, an eyeball—in a relatively straightforward style, the results look alien. Maybe that’s why the Dutch photographer, who has published nineteen books since 1999, remains a cult figure. His latest book, Fashion (2023), is the source for much of the work in the portfolio that follows, and an ideal starting point for anyone curious about his oeuvre as a whole, which is so various it’s difficult to pin down. Based in Amsterdam, Kooiker has a neo-Dadaist approach to subject matter, notably a deadpan take on the still life, which makes him especially appealing to brands, such as Acne, Hermès, and Rick Owens, that…

There’s one townhouse on Bergen Street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn that doesn’t look like any of the others. Instead of traditional brownstone, a layer of cement, raked with tines into rhythmic grooves, covers the facade from the garden level to the roofline. The house belongs to the photographer Stefan Ruiz, and it’s getting a makeover. “Basically, most of the places have been fixed up at least once or twice,” Ruiz told me when I visited last winter. “There are still a few people who have been here for fifty years or more. It’s gotten way fancier.” Ruiz lives and works on the lower two floors and rents out the two apartments above. The downstairs contains his archive of magazines, negatives, and work prints. The cabinets are covered…

Yes, that’s right, this issue of Aperture is a little different. We’ve introduced some design changes to make the magazine slightly more inviting, easier to hold, to fit in your bag, to take and read on the go—or to sit with while you peruse at home. While the format may be different, the same editorial spirit drives this publication, running since 1952: a commitment to presenting a spectrum of ideas and photography, from past and present, reproduced with care and thoughtfully considered through engaging, approachable writing. We live in a strange, beguiling, sometimes uneasy but always evolving world of images. We hope to help make sense of it all. Aperture’s design has shifted numerous times over the past seven decades. The very first issue was a modest 6 ¼ by…

The design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn counts the photographer and filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book of essays Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, in which he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design is characterized by resourcefulness, invention, and the needs of a community. This principle carries through Rawsthorn’s work, where she consistently champions design’s potential to address complex challenges facing societies around the globe. In 2020, Rawsthorn cofounded the Design Emergency project with the Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli, to investigate the design response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project started with an Instagram account. It’s now also a podcast, YouTube channel, and a book, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future.…

IN 1983, THE PHOTOGRAPHER and jewelry designer Coreen Simpson began going once a week to the Roxy, a beating heart of New York City’s downtown nightlife, where, on select nights, hip-hop music fresh from the Bronx pulsed and throbbed. Simpson, then a forty-one-year-old working mother, was far from a regular. She had recently taken a picture of two young men in fedoras who had caught her eye on the subway, and her daughter had suggested she visit the Roxy, thinking she might find it fertile ground for her portraiture work. Inside the club, Simpson set up a small makeshift studio. Her boyfriend at the time, the artist George Mingo, came along to watch her equipment while Simpson scouted the dance floor for subjects. On and off, over several years, she…

How did your new book on gardens and paradise begin? I’ve been working on it since 2020, but the initial stages were restoring the physical garden itself and keeping a garden diary. I originally trained as a herbalist, so I’ve been thinking about plants and utopia for a long time. The book is part memoir, part cultural history. There’s one section where you describe botany as an education in looking. Yes, a very fine-grained looking, where you’re looking with precision to identify and differentiate—which isn’t the only kind of looking I’m interested in anymore. How much did the change and calamity of the pandemic shift your focus? The intense isolation of the pandemic happening at the same time as issues such as Black Lives Matter, and that entire conversation about…

The former lawyer turned designer Duro Olowu creates fashion moments on a resolutely human scale. Born in Lagos into a Nigerian Jamaican family, Olowu had a cosmopolitan upbringing, traveling to Europe and absorbing cultural influences ranging from album covers to Yves Saint Laurent. His tenacious curiosity, like his patternmaking, seems limitless—and his deep knowledge of photography has informed his fashion line. Instead of flashy runway shows, Olowu prefers private viewings that allow him to discuss his patchwork dresses and jacquard coats with the coterie of cultural figures who wear his richly patterned designs. Like him, they appreciate clothes in a context that celebrates collecting antiques, paintings, and handicrafts over any proximity to trends or celebrity endorsements. Olowu has also curated exhibitions in New York, London, and Chicago. On each occasion,…

Nhu Xuan Hua’s photographs defy easy interpretation. A woman sings karaoke in a shining, armored gown. An archival wedding photograph is beguilingly redacted, dress and suit visible but the bodies of husband and wife absent contours. A black dog gazes out the entrance of a temple—who, or what, is it guarding? Even the simplest image is limned with story; we sense it the way we remember our dreams upon waking. Hua’s powerful narrative vision shines through in the clarity of her photographs, which unfold like time passing in slow motion. Born in Paris to Vietnamese immigrant parents, Hua grew up within a French culture that prized assimilation as a mode of survival. It wasn’t until after finishing her studies in photography at the Lycée Auguste Renoir Paris in 2011 and…

Paging through vintage magazines feels like falling into a time warp. The cost of fashion and beauty products alone is boggling ($6.95 for suede gloves! $15 for a wool dress!). They serve as unique capsules from a bygone era of style and fantasy, a time when the people at the helm could make or break artistic careers. One such kingmaker was Alexey Brodovitch, whose art direction for Harper’s Bazaar, across decades, from the mid-1930s through the 1950s, set a new standard for graphic design and photography in magazines. The recent book Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me (Yale University Press, 2024; 174 pages, $50), which accompanied an exhibition last spring at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, demonstrates the breadth of not only Brodovitch’s career but of his artistic prowess, from paintings and…