Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2025 från Aperture

NEGAR AZIMI (“Palimpsest,” page 84) is a writer, editor, and curator. She is the editor in chief of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun, a member of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, and a board member of Artists Space. Her essays, criticism, and reportage have appeared in Frieze, Bookforum, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere. In the following pages, Azimi introduces a portfolio by Shirana Shahbazi. DURGA CHEW-BOSE (“Souvenirs,” page 98) is a Montreal-based writer and filmmaker. A celebrated collection of essays, Too Much and Not in the Mood, was published in 2017. Her debut film, Bonjour Tristesse, an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s beloved novel, premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Chew-Bose previously wrote for Aperture on the…

Mohamed Bourouissa rose to prominence with his Périphérique (2005–8) series of photographs: classically composed tableaux of young people living in the banlieues of Paris following the region’s 2005 uprisings. While he has since expanded his practice to include music, video, and installations, the French Algerian artist remains committed to centering peripheries in his work, whether by growing a community garden influenced by Frantz Fanon, embedding himself with the Black cowboys of Philadelphia, or staging a career survey inside a Monoprix supermarket. ROBERTO BURLE MARX I’ve been involved in creating gardens in recent years, and I often look to projects by the twentieth-century Brazilian artist-gardener Roberto Burle Marx. His modernist approach to public space and structural way of considering landscape is inspiring. JOSEPH BEUYS The concept of “social sculpture” that Joseph…

AMONG THE FIRST THINGS PHOTOGRAPHERS CHOSE to do with their new medium was train it on images and works of art. Before he composed his View from the Window at Le Gras (ca. 1826)—sometime contender for the first photograph from nature—the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce had made heliographic reproductions of engravings showing a man and a horse, a woman at a spinning wheel, and Pope Pius VII. A decade later, Louis Daguerre photographed a sharply lit arrangement of plaster-cast sculptural fragments and a framed picture. The Artist’s Studio (1837) spawns a genre: the photographic study of workspace, materials, inspiring artifacts, and (whether or not the artist is seen) creative presence. In Daguerre’s image, the studio is already a fantasy, its putti and idealized nudes, its wine flask suggestive of artistic…

Every picture-constructing advantage accumulated over centuries is given up to the jittery flow of events as they unfold.—Jeff Wall THIS PHRASE SEEMS A PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF the work of abstract painters such as Joan Mitchell or Jackson Pollock, who reinvented their medium to find different ways to get loose constellations of energetic, antifigurative marks onto their canvases. The quote, however, is from Jeff Wall’s 1995 essay “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” where he uses it to describe something quite different: the model of reportage taken up by many mid-century photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. Compositions could be snatched from the fleeting world in almost instantaneous acts of picture making. On the face of it, Abstract Expressionism and photographic reportage seem to have…

In the summer of 2020, when restaurants and bars were shuttered and the only recourse was the beach, I’d strap a Bluetooth speaker to my bike and ride through Brooklyn, blasting 1980s New Wave. On my playlist: Pet Shop Boys, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, and New Order. The high-tempo synths and high-octane emotions of the music perfectly sound-tracked the unmoored uncertainty of that first pandemic summer. Not long after, a friend sent me a link to an Instagram account—a community archive of Vietnamese New Wave. The account belonged to Elizabeth Ai, a Chinese-Vietnamese American filmmaker and producer who sought to gather images from the early days of “rebuilding and resettlement,” as she wrote in an Instagram caption during September of 2020. “There’s plenty in the way of war, bloodshed,…

Linder Armed with a scalpel, Linder burst onto Manchester’s DIY scene in the late 1970s as a rebellious photomonteur à la Hannah Höch, satirizing society’s pathologies in gleefully absurdist collages culled from pornography and advertising (the chimerical odalisque she made for the cover of the Buzzcocks’ 1977 single “Orgasm Addict” has become a feminist icon). The artist, whose roles also include postpunk front woman and fashion influencer—she donned a meat dress almost thirty years before Lady Gaga—is currently the subject of a London retrospective that pieces together five decades of her expansive, unruly oeuvre. Linder: Danger Came Smiling at the Hayward Gallery, London, February 11–May 5, 2025 American Photography Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum may have come late to acquiring photography, but in three decades it has amassed a collection of more than…

“African art. American style.” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art used this slogan in 2000 to advertise an exhibition of Walker Evans’s photographs of African sculpture that were originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to complement its landmark 1935 exhibition African Negro Art. The tagline reflects the incredibly fraught yet fertile relationship between African art and the Western canon. In particular, it suggests the range of approaches by American photographers in representing African sculptures over the course of the last century.—Wendy A. Grossman In Scramble for Africa 2-3 (2023), David Alekhuogie radically reformulates Noire et blanche using disjointed segments of the iconic picture to form an inverted silhouette of a divvied-up African continent. He sets his evocation of the European colonial powers’ nineteenth-century scramble to carve up Africa against…

Historically cast as a bitter rivalry, these two mediums’ relationship has always been more of a dialogue, shaped by an overlapping interest in the possibilities that emerge from the manipulation of light and color. Some of photography’s first images were of art objects or the auratic painter’s studio. So profound was the camera’s effect on how we looked at paintings that, by 1947, André Malraux could write that art history is “the history of that which can be photographed.” Yet it’s also a history of mutual inspiration. The Pictorialists leaned into the tropes of painting to make the case for photography as Art. The photorealists replicated the precision and clarity offered by the lens, a reaction against the heroic individualism of Abstract Expressionism. Photographers have long sought to escape the…

Pierre Bonnard’s paintings are drenched in color, glowing sensuously. Pleasure might come from his paintings’ surfaces. The canvases appear to breathe, the way skin does. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bonnard picked up a camera, pointed it at friends and especially at Marthe, his lover and future wife. Some images became studies for paintings. Two examples illustrate differences in the mediums, though Bonnard’s camera was used like a paintbrush, in broad strokes. He was playing, just marking impressions of presence, unconcerned with the developing new medium. He often painted and photographed Marthe: in the bathtub, at her toilette, in the garden, posed or in movement. Around 1908, he produced two studies, or portraits, of Marthe squatting in a large wash basin. The photograph came first, Marthe Bathing. Swathes…

Christopher Wool rose to prominence in the late 1980s as a painter of words: large stenciled canvases that imbue language with authority while bleeding it of direct meaning (“SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS”). He painted abstractions too, laying down paint freely by hand or by any number of printmaking methods, such as stencils, stamps, and screen-printing. About fifteen years ago, Wool began to make sculptures out of small found objects. Photography and photobooks have always been part of his practice, but while equally inventive, this work—raw, noirish images of busted environments and talismanic objects that linger mysteriously in the mind—is often overshadowed by the sheer physicality of his painting and sculpture. Last year, Wool filled the nineteenth floor of an office tower in Manhattan’s financial district…

There is a temptation to itemize the objects in Poppy Jones’s pictures. Why? Partly because stillness, as in the still life composition of Jones’s prints, encourages a sense of play, an occasion to once again believe you might hear the sea if you hold a conch shell to your ear. The details of a puffer jacket’s sheen are, according to the British artist, just as significant as the perimeter of a plate or the dialogue between a vase and its shadow. Her staged inventory, like a packing list, provides intrigue on the strength of its chance order. An egg. Nine cherry tomatoes. The dramatic bow of white tulips, four or five days old. All are equal in their eeriness, significant because their shift from everyday object to subject invites inquiry.…

In 1964, the photographer Walter Chappell was commissioned by MGM to take portraits of the actress Sharon Tate in Big Sur, California. Chappell, primarily a fine-art photographer known for his masterfully printed landscapes and nudes, on occasion supported himself by doing odd jobs and celebrity assignments. For almost thirty-five years, Chappell’s photographs of Tate remained hidden, until 2001, when the publisher Roth Horowitz Anderson released a book titled Photographs of Sharon Tate by Walter Chappell. Hauntingly beautiful, with four of the six images highlighting a distinctive 1960s color-film palette, the photographs of Tate convey her sex-symbol status in the years prior to the tragedy that would mark her legacy: her murder five years later by the Manson Family cult. Typically, a trade publisher would announce such a collection of photographs…

Six years ago, Jerald “Coop” Cooper began assembling and making a vast array of still images and videos documenting Black people’s relationship to modern architecture and design. The resulting project, Hood Century, started as an Instagram account in 2019. Since then, @hoodmidcenturymodern has reached over a hundred thousand followers and branched offline, spawning zines, prints, coloring books, and events. Part experimental digital archive, part artwork, part preservation campaign, part community-building exercise, Hood Century is a multimedia ode to Black modernism. Cooper’s feed taps into a deep well of nostalgia. It’s neither the kind of backward-looking nostalgia that delights in the past for its own sake, nor the kind that looks at the past as a place to excavate and exploit. Instead, the goal is to help his audience see themselves…

Of the many radical artists’ groups maundering the streets of Paris in the 1950s, one of the most consequential was the Letterist Internationale, which invented the discipline of psychogeography and the anti-logical walking exercise known as the dérive. Their official mailing address was that of a bar in the fifth arrondissement, Le Tonneau d’Or, where at any given moment the group’s members might or might not be found. In the fifth arrondissement of the 2020s, you are exponentially more likely to encounter a group on an Ernest Hemingway tour—or an Emily in Paris one — than stumble across an avant-garde artists’ collective. If such things still exist in Paris, they probably do so in places with cheaper rents and, correspondingly, a sense of a future that might outweigh the past:…

During my recent studio visit in Los Angeles, the Nigerian-born painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby lingered over a 1972 family portrait—postcolonial, posed. Our eyes caught the handwritten memorial on its surface: “May his soul rest in perfect peace … R.I.P. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Though drawn from scripture, this personal dedication does something remarkable to the portrait’s studied composure. It enacts what the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin understood as the crucial presence of “a real person” behind the image—a presence that pushes against the very logic of colonial photography, which sought to transform subjects into specimens. This intimate act of remembrance draws our attention to what’s strikingly absent from Africa’s early photographic history: the candid moment. Photography in Africa arrived as a colonial tool, a rigid apparatus…

A man in a long-sleeved white shirt and dark pants, a familiar sort of business casual, looks out into the distance. The man is standing in water or in sand—it’s hard to tell which—hands in his pockets. Is he a city rat transplanted to the beach? A human seeking enlightenment? The photograph offers no answers. Blocks of image and color—orange, magenta—overlay the central photograph, which is black and white but perhaps tinged with blue. One of the pictures overlapping the man is difficult to make out but appears to be architectural in nature. The blocks of color are translucent, filmy, striated by skinny white lines—the photographic equivalent of wrinkles? They feel akin to Félix González-Torres’s pellucid curtains: both preamble and main act at once. The picture described above, part of…

TRY TO SEE IT NOW: THE WHITE ROOM HUNG WITH big, figurative canvases. Clicking of heels and clinking of ice. Conversation at low levels thickens. Is there cigarette smoke? We’re on Madison Avenue and 79th Street. It’s 1969, year of the moon walk, Chappaquiddick, the Manson Family murders. Talking to a critic, the gallerist Louis K. Meisel will, by his own report, coin a term for the piquantly accurate paintings of smooth-surfaced things reflecting droplets or shards of light, the crisp Americana in these canvases faintly infused with Pop art irony: “I said, ‘I don’t know, maybe photographic realists. No! Photo-realists. What do you think of that?’” Thus was a movement born. A list of photorealist painters labeled “first generation”: John Baeder, Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close,…

A star-streaked sky, the undulant surface of the sea, a gooseneck lamp, a glowing electric heater, the delicate architecture of a spiderweb, a Porsche cruising along a California freeway—these are some of the subjects that have captured the vivid attention of Vija Celmins. For more than half a century, the Latvian-born, US-raised artist has produced absorbing paintings and drawings that are often inspired by—and mistaken for—photographs. “The image is just a sort of armature on which I hang my marks and make my art,” she has said of her work, which is born of hallucinatory concentration and, in her view, never truly complete. Pieces are worked on and reworked, again and again, becoming less about depiction and more a record of mark making that describes the passage of time. For…

Bruno Munari is a monumental figure in Italian twentieth-century design: a polymath who throughout his seven-decade career seamlessly created book series, lamps, toys, ashtrays, and useless machines (a dig at the Futurist obsession with technology). He taught to adults and children with the same unwavering credos: that art, life, and design should be one, that playing is the best education, and that books make life better. That his path should cross with Jason Fulford, a US photographer and publisher working today, is not strange at all. They share an obsession with open-endedness, a childlike sense of wonder, and a love for the printed page. Luckily for us, the publisher of Munari’s books today, Pietro Corraini, brought them together. Corraini fished unpublished Munari photographs from all over Milan and set up…