Aperture's Blog, page 28

A Literary Publisher’s Bold and Original Photographic Covers

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 217, “Lit,” winter 2014.

New Directions, one of the most significant publishers of modernist literature, was founded on a failure. In 1933, James Laughlin, a twenty-year-old Harvard freshman and aspiring poet, traveled to Italy to study with Ezra Pound at his so-called “Ezuversity.” After assessing the younger man’s work, Pound deemed him hopeless and suggested Laughlin “do something useful. . . . Go back [to school] and be a publisher.” Three years later Laughlin took his advice, which surely would have demoralized most young writers, founding New Directions in his college dorm room. Using a hundred-thousand-dollar familial gift—Laughlin was a Pittsburgh steel heir—his first publication was titled New Directions in Prose and Poetry. An anthology, it featured William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, Henry Miller, and Pound himself.

Cover of Carl Rakosi, Amulet, 1967 Cover of Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger, 1950

Laughlin would go on to publish a coterie of twentieth-century writers, including T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Tennessee Williams, Edith Sitwell, Nathanael West, John Hawkes, Kenneth Rexroth, Octavio Paz, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Creeley. Unlike some other American presses, Laughlin was interested in publishing foreign writers, and New Directions reprinted Herman Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Guillaume Apollinaire; Laughlin was Nabokov’s first American publisher. This whole article could be about those books and how they came to shape an essential cultural ethos. Instead it is about their significant, if less examined, covers and how they came to do the same. Ironically, given how influential the New Directions look came to be, Laughlin morally objected to the idea of people “buying books by eye.” In the preface to a 1947 collection of New Directions book jackets, he wrote, “It’s a very bad thing. People should buy books for their literary merit. But since I have never published a book which I didn’t consider a serious literary work—and never intend to—I have had no bad conscience about using [designers] to increase sales.”

New Directions covers are easy to spot but difficult to describe. They are black-and-white. They are stark, contemplative, inky, and dreamlike. They often feature cropped images—usually taken by the designers themselves and rarely credited—printed full bleed, appearing to strain against the margins that hold them. From the 1940s through the mid-1960s, the covers were designed by a small handful of art directors and freelancers, most notably Gilda Hannah, David Ford, Rudolph de Harak, and Gertrude Huston (Laughlin’s wife). In some cases, they are simple and straightforward, illustrating the title (Stand Still Like a Hummingbird by Henry Miller, which features . . . a hummingbird arrested in flight), or picturing the author (Selected Cantos by Ezra Pound).

These early photographic covers are arrestingly original—and influential in their use of photography as integral to the cover design.

In other cases, they flirt with abstraction: double exposures (Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre), extreme close-ups (Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima), long exposures (A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud), negative images (Unfair Arguments with Existence by Lawrence Ferlinghetti), reticulated negatives (Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo), blur (The Lime Twig by John Hawkes), photogram and photo-collage (A Dark Stranger by Julien Gracq), and heavily contrasted images (The Happy Birthday of Death by Gregory Corso) proliferate within their ranks. In rare cases, the covers feature pure photographic abstraction (New Poems by Eugenio Montale). Titles and author names are at times marginalized, pushed to the edges of the frame or otherwise worked into the composition of the image. These early photographic covers are arrestingly original—before this point in publishing, book covers tended to feature billboardesque typography on a plain background—and influential in their experimentation with the plasticity of the printed image and use of photography as integral to the cover design.

Cover of Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, 1968 Cover of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Unfair Arguments with Existence, 1963

Perhaps due to Laughlin’s lack of interest in visual appeal, New Directions never had an institutionalized creative mandate. Instead, its earliest book covers reflect the vision that emerged from one man’s sensibility, Alvin Lustig. Laughlin met Lustig in 1940 while visiting Tennessee Williams in Los Angeles. At the time of their meeting, the young designer was working as a freelance printer and typographer, doing jobs on a letterpress that he kept in the back room of a drugstore. (Their mutual friend, the noted writer, intellectual, and bookseller Jacob Zeitlin introduced the men.) Less than a year later, Lustig designed his first New Directions cover. In an interview for this article, Lustig’s widow, Elaine Lustig Cohen—who also worked at New Directions and photographed for, designed, and collaborated on a handful of covers herself—explained that her husband had full creative reign. “There was no such thing as an art director,” said Lustig Cohen. “James did it all. Every time there was a new book, he told Alvin to do the jacket. James either liked the result or he didn’t.” This lack of interference was in keeping with Laughlin’s treatment of manuscripts, which were barely edited before being sent off to print; perhaps Laughlin’s response to Pound reflected a tendency to trust other people’s instincts with his life project.

Lustig is not especially known for his photographic covers—he worked with largely abstract collage strategies that referenced, and sometimes used, type metal from a print shop—but he did set the tone for New Directions (and indeed, the book design industry) by moving away from purely text-based covers and utilizing pared-down, graphic images that referenced the printing process. When he died at the age of forty in 1955, Gilda Hannah (then Kuhlman) succeeded him as the in-house designer. During her tenure, New Directions covers became almost entirely photographic. It was an all-in-one, streamlined job: Hannah took the majority of the photographs, occasionally commissioning an image or buying from stock, made the design and type decisions, and chose the book’s paper. She produced the cover image for The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca using “a defective Leica” in order to achieve lens flare, went uptown in Manhattan to photograph a “relatively non-responsive” Jorge Luis Borges in his hotel room for an early edition of Labyrinths, and collaged her photograph of the Statue of Liberty for Kafka’s vertiginous Amerika cover. By the time she parted ways with the publisher in the early 1960s, citing Laughlin’s notorious lack of prompt payment, New Directions had established a recognizable and effective formula for its covers, begun by Lustig and propagated by Hannah and a small handful of freelancers (including the early Pop artist Ray Johnson): a graphic black-and-white photograph matched with modest text.

Cover of Federico García Lorca, The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, 1968 Cover of William Carlos Williams, In The American Grain, 1956
All photographs courtesy New Directions Press, New York

In addition to New Directions, there were other pioneering, modernist publishers during and after this era. Knopf, and their imprint Pantheon Books, published significant fiction and poetry, including Ezra Pound; Grove Press published Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and the majority of the Beat writers (including Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which New Directions had turned down for being too sexually explicit). Meridian Books printed writers like Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, and Ralph Ellison before going out of business. Independents such as the Jargon Society, Capra Press, Black Sparrow Books, Graywolf Press, and North Print Press, founded between 1951 and ’74, each modeled themselves in some way on New Directions. While these other publishers also tried out new design strategies—Grove Press was particularly innovative—they did so inconsistently, shifting back and forth between black-and-white and color, abstract design, photographic images, and text-only covers. New Directions managed to experiment with design without losing uniformity; they articulated a recognizable visual treatise that also boosted sales. As avant-garde poet Eliot Weinberger wrote in his 1997 obituary for Laughlin in Jacket magazine, “In my adolescence, the black-and-white photographic covers of ND books were unmistakable on the bookstore shelves, and I would buy any of them at random, knowing that if ND had published it, it was something that had to be read.” This holds true decades later for any reader of modernist literature; an early- to midcentury New Directions book is instantly identifiable on a crowded shelf.

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Today, Laughlin’s theory that a cover is just an advertisement for its book, the “serious” content, would be considered diminishing and unimaginative. Covers matter beyond the stores where books are purchased or passed over; readers return to them hundreds of times over as they tunnel through a book. Cover design (especially involving photographic images) has become inexorably entangled with the experience of encountering, and traveling through, literature.

These several decades of New Directions’ photographic book covers, often the most original when they were simplest, did something truly modern: by using pictures to describe words rather than the other way around, they jettisoned the artificial boundaries between the two. They remind us that both text and image require a kind of literacy; we often speak of “reading images,” for instance, and poets challenge us to “see” words on the page. Both text and images have the potential to objectify and document our lives in a different way from, say, painting or sculpture (which are rarely utilized in a “nonartistic” sense). Denise Levertov, who published more than thirty books of poetry with New Directions, put it best in her early-1970s essay “Looking at Photographs,” written in response to a request from this magazine: “I have come to see that the art of photography shares with poetry a factor more fundamental: it makes its images by means anybody and everybody uses for the most banal purposes, just as poetry makes its structures, its indivisibility of music and meaning, out of the same language for utilitarian purposes, for idle chatter, for uninspired lying … photographs teach the poet to see better.” Levertov could have illustrated her essay with the cover of The Cosmological Eye, the first book of Henry Miller’s published in the United States—by New Directions—in 1939. Superimposed atop a full-bleed, black-and-white photograph of clouds is a single, open eye. It belongs to James Laughlin.

Hervé Guibert’s Passionately Restrained Photographs

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 217, “Lit,” winter 2014.

I shall always refuse to be a photographer: this attraction frightens me, it seems to me that it can quickly turn to madness, because everything is photographable, everything is interesting to photograph, and out of one day of one’s life one could cut out thousands of instants, thousands of little surfaces, and if one begins why stop? — Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers, Journals 1976–1991

When Hervé Guibert died in 1991, he had just turned thirty-six. A year before, the writer, journalist, and photographer had opened his autobiographical novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, with the declaration that he had AIDS, but went on to insist that he “would become, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, one of the first people on earth to survive this deadly malady.” When the book caused a sensation (magnified by the fact that one of its characters was a thinly disguised Michel Foucault, whose HIV-positive status contributed to his death in 1984), Guibert became the strikingly handsome, articulate, and very public face of AIDS in France. He didn’t avoid the spotlight, but it made him famous in a way he never wanted to be, and the attention exhausted him even before the disease left him frail and nearly blind. that extraordinary stroke of luck eluded him. Two weeks before he succumbed, he tried to commit suicide with an overdose of pills but failed.

Hervé Guibert, Autoportrait (Self-portrait), 1976Hervé Guibert, Sienne (Siena), 1979

Wildly prolific, Guibert was driven, compulsive, and rarely satisfied. He wrote twenty-three other books, nearly all of them in the ten years before his death (only a handful have been translated into English). In The Mausoleum of Lovers, a collection of journal entries published posthumously in 2011 and just translated, he often sounds melancholic, if not desperate, but then much of it was written as an open letter to an inconstant lover who was allowed to read the journals as they were written. Melodramatic moments—furious, passionate, delusional—alternate with cooler observations, often about photography, which was, along with writing, a highly personal form of expression for Guibert. “The photo that someone other than I could take, that isn’t bound to the particular relation I have to this or that, I don’t want to take it,” he writes.

Very little of his photographic work has been published or exhibited in the United States, so the larger body of work remains rather elusive. Still, much of what has appeared is striking: emotionally warm, even a bit sentimental at times, but stylistically cool and confident. His images range from artful interiors and landscapes to pictures of friends, family, and lovers. The mood is usually hushed and intimate. Working in a distinctive black and white that tends toward soft platinum grays, he made what feel like visual diary entries, quick but thoughtful notes, often recording his immediate surroundings—his desk, his mantel, his bookcase—with the same descriptive intensity he brought to photographs of boys in his bed. Even in his most seductive self-portraits, Guibert never seems show-offy. The work is restrained and subtle—as if it were made not with a public in mind but for himself and a small circle of friends. We often feel we’re peeking into a private and somewhat privileged world, where much is revealed and just as much withheld.

Hervé Guibert, Agathe, 1980Hervé Guibert, Isabelle, 1980

In Ghost Image, a 1982 collection of Guibert’s brief essays on photography, reissued this year by University of Chicago Press, he writes about photographers he admires. They’re an idiosyncratic pantheon that includes Diane Arbus, Pierre Molinier, F. Holland Day, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Duane Michals, the last of whom seems especially influential on the selection of images included here. Clearly, he looked long and hard at his precursors and his contemporaries, but some of his most telling essays are dialogues with his critical self, an accusatory voice that he never allows to have the last word. When that voice points out that much of his work “oozes homosexuality,” he shoots back:

“How could it be otherwise? It’s not that I want to hide it, or that I want to boast about it arrogantly. But it’s the least I can do to be sincere. How can you speak about photography without speaking of desire? If I mask my desire, if I deprive it of its gender, if I leave it vague . . . I would feel as if I were weakening my stories, or writing carelessly . . . The image is the essence of desire and if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory.”

Guibert’s criticism can stray into knotty intellectual territory, but he steers clear of dry, deadening theory. What’s most engaging about his work in writing and photography is its frankness and sincerity—qualities the contemporary avant-garde has little use for. Even his restraint feels passionate—an elegance at once instinctive and hard-won.

Hervé Guibert, Table de travail (Work table), 1985Hervé Guibert, La tête de Jeanne d’Arc (The head of Joan of Arc), n.d.
All photographs courtesy Callicoon Fine Arts, New York

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Why Are We Seeing So Many Photographs on Book Covers?

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” spring 2020.

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 bold black all-caps text frame an image that offers a way into thinking about what the individual titles of the trilogy might refer to—Outline, Transit, Kudos. But after reading the book, you realize how provisional the cover’s illustrative nature is. Corral’s design was in reaction to reading Cusk’s prose: “It isn’t super linear,” he says. “It’s more about being part of the journey.”

Rachel Cusk, Transit (2018), with photograph by Charlie Engman

The U.S. edition of the American writer and T Magazine editor Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (2015) and the U.K. edition of the British writer Olivia Laing’s first novel, Crudo (2018), turn this observation concrete. Both novelists were inspired to use photographs for their book jackets after seeing them in galleries. Yanagihara saw Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man (1969); Laing saw Wolfgang Tillmans’s astro crusto (2012). Laing has noted that Tillmans’s image of a postprandial crustacean shell connects to a scene in the book where her lead character, Kathy, smashes a crab open with a hammer.

But the principle of using someone else’s work to frame your own rises above the evident linkage. Laing’s use of the American writer Kathy Acker as her protagonist—partly quoting Acker’s work, largely fictionalizing her life—is a feature of her style of autofiction, but it is also bound up with how writing is described in the novel: “She wrote fiction, sure, but she populated it with the already extant, the pre-packaged and ready-made.” Laing’s Kathy is described as “Warhol’s daughter,” someone who is “happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause.”

It’s a description that is as much about image use in publishing as it is about writing. The cover of A Little Life reproduces Hujar’s photograph of a close-up of a man’s face at the point of orgasm; although shorn of its title, the ambivalence about whether it’s a face in agony or ecstasy is ramped up. Yanagihara has described the cover as a “sensation—of witness and also of trespass—that I wanted the reader to feel as well.” A Little Life opens in New York in the early 1980s, a time when Hujar was still working, and chronicles the lives of four young men with a tight focus on private and inner worlds as represented by the cover. One of the four, JB, is an artist, and the photographs he takes of his friends—depicting them in his artworks without their consent—is what begins his distance from them. “Tonight, I am a camera, he told himself, and tomorrow I will be JB again.”

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The novel’s Instagram account, set up by Yanagihara and her social-media manager, has spawned similar reactions in readers—not through posting portraits of their friends as the book’s character does, but by posting portraits of themselves with the book itself. As one London-based reader’s body extends out from the jacket, it’s as if a novel can be slipped on and off like an alternate, temporary identity or a thing worn. It’s a performance that resonates with something the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin wrote: “That the self is a condition of disguise and that we can move back and forth in terms of sexualities, in terms of social being, in terms of all kinds of sense of who we are.”

Cover of Olivia Laing, Crudo (2018), with photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans

What these book jackets illuminate is the way the contemporary novel, both in content and cover, performs the idea of the self continually collapsing back onto other ideas, other images—as if somehow the prose operates as a written means of interconnectedness between visual ideas, a kind of long-form resort to the pictorial. It’s a queer way of defining things, a privileging of final looks over how things might first be written down. It seems somehow reminiscent of record covers and not book jackets, of the photographs Steven Patrick Morrissey once chose for the singles and albums The Smiths released, or of the covers Peter Saville once designed for Joy Division and New Order that made use of sourced photographs. Perhaps it is the realization that novels are now the sleeve notes of our time.

Announcing the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist

Aperture’s support of emerging photographers and other lens-based artists is a vital part of our mission. The annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography—identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

Aperture’s editors reviewed over one thousand submissions, and we are thrilled to announce the shortlisted artists for the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize:

Samantha Box
Brian Lau
Akshay Mahajan
Vân-Nhi Nguyễn
Ziyu Wang

These artists join the ranks of illustrious winners and artists shortlisted for the Portfolio Prize in past years, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Dannielle Bowman, Alejandro Cartagena, Jessica Chou, Eli Durst, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Natalie Krick, Daniel Jack Lyons, Mark McKnight, Drew Nikonowicz, Sarah Palmer, RaMell Ross, Bryan Schutmaat, Donavon Smallwood, Ka-Man Tse, and Guanyu Xu.

The 2023 Portfolio Prize winner, to be announced on Friday, May 12, will be published in Aperture magazine, receive a $3,000 cash prize and a $1,000 gift card to shop for gear at mpb.com, and present an exhibition at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York. Each runner-up will receive an online feature.

Alongside the five shortlisted artists, twenty finalists were selected by Aperture’s editors. The finalists and shortlisted artists will each receive a virtual portfolio review session with an Aperture editor, who will provide thoughtful and constructive feedback on their work.

The twenty finalists are:

Hannah Altman, Sasha Arutyunova, Kerr Cirilo, Rose Marie Cromwell, Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo, Natalie Ivis, Hassan Kurbanbaev, Camille Farrah Lenain, Drew Leventhal, Morgan Levy, Jesse Ly, Kavi Pujara, Guarionex Rodriguez, Hyunmin Ryu, Agnieszka Sosnowska, Mika Sperling, Kai Wasikowski, Jaclyn Wright, Leafy Yeh, Rana Young 

Samantha Box, One Kind of Story, 2020, from the series Caribbean DreamsBrian Lau, House in Flurry, 2020, from the series We’re Just Here For the Bad GuysAkshay Mahajan, from the series To die is to turn in goldVân-Nhi Nguyễn, Untitled (Girl with Pearls), 2022, from the series As You Grow OlderZiyu Wang, Lads, 2022, from the series Go Get ‘Em Boy

The Delight and Absurdity of Domestic Photography

Throughout the pandemic, the popular conception of home became a place of unrelenting monotony—a site of confinement, despair, potentially even breakdown. Creativity was stifled when stuck in one’s living room. It was impossible to maintain professional output while sharing a space with one’s children. To many women, this new obsession with the inside, the domestic, was both frustrating and amusing. Home was now a space confining both sexes. And yet, female artists have long centered home as a site for probing discussions and creative explorations. The resultant works often deal with the themes that contributed to women’s very presence at home in the first place: sexism, pay disparity, childcare inequality, patriarchal conditioning and control.

The domestic and, in turn, the family have been popular topics within the history of photography, as well as the subject of various notable exhibitions—for example, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, in 1991, and Who’s Looking at the Family? at London’s Barbican, in 1994. Many of these were curated, in part, to redress the lack of female representation within museum shows, a fact that makes the included works’ commentary on the narrowness of women’s opportunities and freedoms only more poignant. Women photographers were in the museum, and yet, somehow, still at home, in their place.

Spreads from Talia Chetrit, Joke (MACK, 2022)

In the catalog for Pleasures and Terrors, which featured Ellen Brooks, Jo Ann Callis, Doug DuBois, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, Sage Sohier, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others, the curator, Peter Galassi, wrote that artists “began to photograph at home not because it was important, in the sense that political issues are important, but because it was there—the one place that is easier to get to than the street.” The comment likely amused some female artists at the time but now reads as starkly unperceptive, if not blind to varied motivations in creative experience. This lack is especially obvious when one surveys just a few of the many new books and photographic projects dealing with home and domesticity: Talia Chetrit’s Joke (MACK, 2022), Csilla Klenyánszki’s Pillars of Home (Self-published, 2019), and Kuba Ryniewicz’s Daily Weeding (Note Note Éditions, 2021).

These image makers photograph home both because it is “there” (and was “there” more obviously than ever during the pandemic) and because it is “political” and “important,” to use Galassi’s aspirational words. Both Chetrit and Klenyánszki infer that the very fact of their both, as women artists and mothers, being “there” (at home, caring for babies) is, in itself, fruitful territory for the exploration of some of the most troublesome and limiting divisions, and habits of thinking, within society. Who is a mother? What behaviors make her good? What subjugations should she tolerate? What should she keep of herself? Can she be sexual? Can she be an artist? Who is a father figure? Is he at home too? What is home? In Chetrit’s pictures especially, the send-up of familial tropes and domestic scenes, with humor and light irony, is enjoyable—an older man sits, legs spread, his chest hair showing through his mesh undershirt; a young father, wearing a dress with layers of yellow tulle, stands next to his baby; disembodied mannequin limbs appear on the page before a close-up of a caesarean scar.

Talia Chetrit, Align, 2019, from Joke (MACK, 2022) Talia Chetrit, Model Family, 2020–22, from Joke (MACK, 2022)

The works made me think of Jo Spence and Patricia Holland’s book, Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (1991), in which Spence asks, “The family album: what does it contain? What lies beyond the symbolic images of special events, occasions, celebrations, ‘success’—particular weddings, the new baby, holidays, the ‘happy family’?” Spence offers, “Perhaps, superficially, family albums tell us more about the accepted ways of picture-making, or what was considered appropriate at any historical time, than they do about the particular family represented?” Chetrit’s goal seems to be to revile “appropriateness,” to thumb a nose at the serenity and wholesomeness that are expected in depictions of mothers, families, and children.

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On the first page, we see a baby, naked except for a diaper, playing in front of a shelf of children’s books (Madeline and the Cats of Rome, Mr. Tiger Goes Wild). In front of it, a single adult leg bisects the image, masking half the child: the leg wears a shiny black thigh-high boot. The combination of the supposedly pure and the latently erotic is designed to disarm, to nod to the many often irreconcilable fetishes that surround women—mother, sex object, Madonna, whore. Chetrit’s picture is also funny, as a visual. I laughed when I saw it. Projects about home often deal with pungent dichotomies: prosperity versus compromise, safety versus violence. Chetrit composes such juxtapositions with refreshing lightness, refusing to be solemn, sentimental. The book’s title here—Joke—is perfect. She finds the traditional stereotypes of family ridiculous. She will not dignify them with anger. Her humor is always more sardonic than slapstick, a little knowing, a little cool. The inclusion of high fashion in the images (Balenciaga jeans, a micro Chanel handbag) is unsurprising—Chetrit has photographed for various brands, such as Acne Studios and Celine—but contributes to the sense of insolence and chilliness. Such inclusions give the work an impenetrability, which in itself refutes the idealized vision of mothers as open, kind, soft, welcoming.

Spread from Csilla Klenyánszki, Pillars of Home (Self-published, 2019)

There is also wit in Klenyánszki’s Pillars of Home, which makes a physical manifestation of the concept of juggling, a buzzword in so many conversations about domesticity and motherhood. The small-scale book features photographs of sculptures built from household objects during the photographer’s baby’s nap time. The statues are precarious: a baguette is about to snap under the weight of an umbrella, a pile of oranges is ready to tumble down. In Pillars of Home, Klenyánszki writes that, should the installation collapse, not only will the “existence of the image” be “in danger” but also “the noise of the fallen objects might awaken the sleeping baby, which puts an end to the working session.” The book is a comment on limited freedom—on the way a child restricts options and hampers work, the way the family can smother the individual.

Csilla Klenyanszki, Nr18, from Pillars of Home (Self-published), 2019 Csilla Klenyanszki, Nr74, from Pillars of Home (Self-published), 2019

Looking at each sculpture, one imagines the forthcoming crash, a wail from an adjacent room, the rush of feet toward the cry as the objects shatter or roll, the vibrations spreading across the room. The best images are the ones where the fall seems certain and particularly violent: a vase of flowers balances on an open door, a pair of splayed scissors sits vertically on top of the blooms. One knows it will come down. There is a shakiness and vulnerability that seems in keeping with the precariousness of our times. Everything we build, the supposed securities of home and family, can be swept away in a moment by external factors: pandemic, death, war, climate change, the cruelty and inexplicability of other people’s choices.

These books speak of an age of juxtapositions, dissonance, oddness—of uncanniness, within the home as everywhere.

Klenyánszki’s book nods to the arguable irrationality of bringing a child into a collapsing world. One of the project’s weaknesses—repetitiveness—is also its strength. By the middle of the book, the photographs, and sculptures, start to blend; one tires. It infers the relentlessness of child-rearing, of life in a small apartment, and, in turn, the relentlessness of worry, instability, crisis.

Kuba Ryniewicz, from Daily Weeding (Note Note Éditions, 2021)

The monotony of crisis also underpins Ryniewicz’s Daily Weeding, which was made during lockdown, and features images of friends and neighbors hanging out near high-rise tower blocks, gardening, or nurturing swollen pregnant stomachs. An accompanying text by Olivia Laing refers to “love in a tiny space.” She wonders, “Could it still feel free?”

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Writing in the introduction to Family Snaps, Holland argues that “making and preserving a family snapshot is an act of faith in the future.” What all three books, but especially Joke and Pillars of Home, present is the family snapshot when that faith in the future is shaken, no longer rational or appropriate. They speak of an age of juxtapositions, dissonance, oddness—of uncanniness, within the home as everywhere. If the function of the family photograph has typically been to serve as propaganda for traditional systems, for conformity and the illusion of bliss, these works seek to unsettle, to gently mock. But they are not simplistic manifestos. All three books retain the deeply personal aspects, along with a sense of quotidian flow, that make domestic photography interesting. They are as much records of ambivalence as of anger, of acceptance punctuated by occasional flashes of thirst for self-fulfillment, authorship, and—the perpetual great threat to home and family—more.

Kuba Ryniewicz, from Daily Weeding (Note Note Éditions, 2021)

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” in The PhotoBook Review.

The Struggle for Survival in the Amazon

For more than fifty years, the photographer Claudia Andujar has collaborated with, advocated for, and photographed the Yanomami, the Indigenous people who inhabit a swathe of Amazonia that stretches across Brazil and Venezuela and face dire threats to their autonomy and survival from settler farmers, illegal gold miners, and malignant right-wing political forces. The Yanomami Struggle at the Shed in New York is the latest iteration of an exhibition that features more than two hundred of Andujar’s most iconic and striking photographs of the community as well as videos and more than eighty drawings and paintings by Yanomami artists.

Since first meeting members of the Yanomami in 1971, Andujar has attempted to capture the daily life and spiritual essence of Yanomami worlds with experimental photographic techniques, using infrared film, saturated-color filters, and lens and exposure manipulations to translate their lifeways and spiritual systems for outsiders. Andujar has dedicated most of her life and career to the Yanomami cause and their communities as a singular subject. Yet despite Andujar’s sincere belief that images can help protect these people from the encroachment of coloniality, a lingering tension consumes her work. She attempts to represent both worlds foreign to her and sites of struggle through a lens that carries the baggage of ethnography’s most romanticizing and preservationist impulse—that her subjects’ value is in their being untouched by modernity.

Claudia Andujar, Illegal gold mining barge in Yanomami territory, ca. 1989
© the artist

Unlike recent iterations of this traveling exhibition, this tension finds some relief in the Yanomami artworks that visualize not only the community’s life and cosmological worlds but also their struggle against the theft and destruction of their land by deforestation, slash-and-burn farming, and strip mining. These contributions do much to counter Andujar’s tendency toward the ethnographic, allowing for her decades-long advocacy-through-representation to operate more collaboratively with Yanomami voices.

Claudia Andujar, Catrimani region, 1972–76
© the artistClaudia Andujar, Collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River, Roraima state, 1976

The Yanomami Struggle takes up the entirety of the Shed’s main exhibition hall, which is divided into five spaces that present six thematic sections. At previous venues in São Paulo, Paris, and London, the exhibition presented Andujar’s work largely on its own. In New York, her photographs are juxtaposed with fifty-eight new drawings, paintings, and prints and three new short films by Yanomami artists. Many of these works are from the Fondation Cartier’s collection and are being shown in the US for the first time. Andujar’s photographs are suspended throughout the Shed’s main space, in a constellation of black-and-white portraits and saturated infrared images of Yanomami homes and environs: pink jungle canopies, bright orange and yellow yano (communal houses) surrounded by sweet-potato leaves, and glittering blue waterways and star-covered palm-leaf roofs. Interspersed throughout are figurative drawings in colored pencil and felt pen by Yanomami artists Joseca Mokahesi and Ehuana Yaira and shaman and leader Davi Kopenawa—who depict origin stories and xapiri (spirit helpers) with expressive intensity. The exhibition is no longer dedicated to Andujar’s work and activism, as past iterations have explicitly stated, but rather to “the long-term collaboration” of Andujar and the Yanomami people, as the exhibition’s introductory text states.

Installation view of  The Yanomami Struggle , The Shed, New York, 2023. Photograph by Adam Reich
Courtesy Fondation CartierInstallation view of  The Yanomami Struggle , The Shed, New York, 2023. Photograph by Adam Reich
Courtesy Fondation Cartier

The show has accordingly become less of an anthropological photo essay or biographical retrospective and more of an aesthetic collaboration. Most notable among these collaborators are Andujar’s primary partners in efforts to defend the community, the shaman and Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa, a central advocate and spokesperson for the Yanomami on the international stage, and the anthropologist Bruce Albert. Both also provide statements on the exhibition labels that explain Yanomami life, culture, and spiritual beliefs.

The tension between solidarity and romanticization remains throughout, however. On one wall are Andujar’s chiaroscuro portraits of Yanomami individuals, titled Moving Identities, which seem to escape the anthropological with intimate framing and dramatical shadowing from the naturally lit yano interiors in which they were taken. Yet the titles straddle portraiture (Moxi Hwaya u thëri, Vital Warasi’s son, 1974­–76) and ethnographic modes of description (A young man’s foreskin is tied to his waist with cotton thread, 1974). The section immediately following the main hall, Rites and Vision, is the most fraught, with photographs focused on reahu (funerary rituals). Kopenawa’s description of associated rites, in which shamans “take our image into the time of dream,” is an evocative explanation of the power of image making in Yanomami belief.

Davi Kopenawa, The house of the xapiri spirits, 2003
© the artist

The Yanomami Struggle was curated by Thyago Nogueira, head of contemporary photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, where it debuted, with the guidance of Kopenawa, whose voice is the prominent in the explanatory labels. We are left to trust in the collaborative process as to whether images of Yanomami people and rituals are fit for outsiders to view, and must acknowledge the agency of community collaborators. The film Earth Forest Shamans (2014), for example, directed by Yanomami filmmaker Morzaniel Iramrɨ, documents a reahu over the course of one hour, bulwarking against exoticizing impulses with an Indigenous lens.

Multiple Visions, the section of the exhibition dedicated entirely to Yanomami art, comes as a relief. It contains only several portraits of the artists by Andujar. Whereas the drawings in the opening section use figuration to depict Yanomami oral histories and spirit beings, the artists here tend toward abstraction to translate an experience of the landscape and the influence of the spiritual beings that inhabit them. Visions of the world of the xapiri by André Taniki, Vital Warasi, and Orlando Nakɨ uxima, executed in felt pen and colored pencil in the 1970s, are electric fields of vibrating lines and pictographic figures. Recent acrylic paintings and stamped monotypes by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe depict Atayu ihiupi husipe pesi (caterpillar cocoons) and Moka maimki (frog legs) with repetitions of stunning organic geometries.

The exhibition is no longer dedicated to Andujar’s work and activism, as past iterations have explicitly stated, but rather to “the long-term collaboration” of Andujar and the Yanomami people.

There is, on the one hand, a sense of the artists as informants, in which they illustrate their cosmological worlds for inquiring colonial minds in search of ethnographic data. On the other hand, these Yanomami works are undeniably the emergent forms of an Indigenous modernist movement. The exhibition appeals to a taste for authentic and unmediated Indigenous worlds, but it is transparent about their very real mediation, either by presenting facsimiles of the earliest works on paper, in some cases, or by referring to pens and pencils as the “tools” first provided to these artist-shamans in 1974 by Andujar and Carlo Zacquini to document their worlds on their own terms. Either way, the cosmovisions of Yanomami shamanic practitioners are deployed as opportunities to translate unseen worlds for audiences seeking to be transported to “untouched” sites of wonder.

In the final room of the exhibition, focused on the sections Struggle and Fight and Vaccination and Health, Andujar’s photography transitions to more explicit and straightforward realism to reflect the worsening conditions of life in the Amazon. Even with Brazil’s election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022 and the subsequent creation of the country’s first Ministry for Indigenous Peoples, the Yanomami face ongoing invasion by extractive capitalism and encroaching settler-colonial governments and extractive capitalism. The genocidal overtones of such campaigns are reflected in Marcados, Andujar’s series of numbered identification photographs that depicts the bureaucratic organization of the Yanomami during a critical vaccination program in the 1980s.

André Taniki, Visions from the world of the xapiri, with its houses, mirrors, and paths, 1978–81
© the artist

The terrible potential of such systems is not lost on Andujar, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a child, and the show here closes with a multimedia installation based on the 1989 exhibition Genocide of the Yanomami: Death of Brazil. The flashing portraits overlaid with the word morrer, Portuguese for “to die” but also “to fade,” are a culminating visualization of the existential threat to the Yanomami and illustrates how Andujar’s own background has contributed to her half-century-long dedication to this subject and cause. But despite the calls to action by Andujar and others that make apparent the ongoing need for solidarity, there remains the painful and unavoidable irony that the exhibition is organized by the Fondation Cartier, a philanthropic nonprofit funded by the sale of precious-metal jewelry and luxury goods.

“While you destroy, we draw,” Davi Kopenawa said through a translator at an event at Princeton University, several days before the exhibition’s opening. “We contemplate trees trembling, and we observe nature. It is important for you to respect the lungs of the Amazon, to not destroy it, to value this through art. We make art also to protect our land . . . We are drawing, and we are making the white man understand what we do while they are living in the cities.” One might wonder what The Yanomami Struggle would be without Andujar’s photographs, showing only the art, film, and voices of the Yanomami contributors. Perhaps that could be the next iteration of the exhibition, and indeed of Andujar’s activism itself, allowing for the ally and her image making to fade into the background while the Yanomami express, through drawing and political action alike, full sovereignty over their representations and lands.

The Yanomami Struggle is on view at The Shed, New York, through April 16, 2023.

Remembering the Life and Work of Kwame Brathwaite

Aperture is deeply saddened by the loss of Kwame Brathwaite, who passed away on April 1, 2023, at the age of eighty-five. Brathwaite (1938–2023) was a visionary Harlem-based photographer who used his images to advance the Black Is Beautiful message throughout the 1960s. From his photographs of jazz icons to his indelible images featuring the Grandassa Models, Brathwaite blended art, music, fashion, and community activism to spread a powerful message of social, economic, and representational justice.

At Aperture, we were honored to feature Brathwaite’s work in the pages of our magazine, to publish his first monograph (Black Is Beautiful, 2019), and to collaborate with him and his son, Kwame S. Brathwaite, to organize a traveling exhibition dedicated to his work. As we consider Kwame Brathwaite’s incredible legacy and how his work continues to move audiences globally, we asked a group of Aperture contributors to offer their reflections.

Kwame Brathwaite, A school for one of the many modeling groups that had begun to embrace natural hairstyles in the 1960s, ca. 1966 Kwame Brathwaite, Priscilla Bardonille, African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Harlem, ca. 1962

Antwaun Sargent

Kwame Brathwaite’s influence on the world of Black image production has been felt across the culture. Brathwaite gave visual power to the now common belief that Black is beautiful. This has resulted in generations of Black image makers making photographs that have further defined and celebrated our collective humanity. Without Brathwaite’s considerable contribution I don’t know where photography would be today. His rich image archive is a testament to a people who took control of their own representations. 

Antwaun Sargent is author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019) and Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists (2020).

Kwame Brathwaite, Marcus Garvey Day Parade, Harlem, ca. 1967

Tanisha C. Ford

Much has been said about the power and boldness of Kwame Brathwaite’s photography. It is true, he chronicled the Black radical spirit of the 1950s and 1960s in ways unparalleled. But his sensitivity was his greatest asset. The way he adjusted the aperture of his lens, the way he positioned himself in relation to his subjects: these artistic choices gave his photographs complexity, layers. You can see softness and vulnerability, not just righteous anger, in the facial expressions of the freedom fighters whom Brathwaite captured on celluloid. And you can’t help but to linger in this nuance, to grapple with how the images force you to reconsider everything you think you know about Black Power, about beautiful Blackness. Sensitivity. I immediately discerned the depth and dimensionality of Kwame Brathwaite’s emotional register when I interviewed him for the first time. His sincerity, his humility, informed his commitment to depicting the full humanity of Black people around the globe. I hope we will always recognize his sensitivity as the vital element of his artistic and political legacy.

Tanisha C. Ford is a regular contributor to Aperture, and author of Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019), and Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (2019).

Kwame Brathwaite, Model wearing a natural hairstyle, AJASS, Harlem, ca. 1970

Tyler Mitchell

From the moment I first saw Kwame Brathwaite’s work I was transfixed. There’s a clarity and power to his portraits, which remind me that conversations around photography, representation, and equity have always been and will always be vital. I’m saddened to hear of his loss. I thank him for his timeless images and I thank his son Kwame Jr. for his commitment to the upkeep of his father’s archive. 

Tyler Mitchell is a photographer based in New York. His work appeared in Aperture’s Winter 2020 issue, “Utopia,” and his book I Can Make You Feel Good was published in 2020.

Kwame Brathwaite, Grandassa Models and AJASS members posing for a Naturally ’67 poster outside the Apollo Theater, Harlem, ca. 1967
All photographs courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles Kwame Brathwaite, Grandassa Models at the Merton Simpson Gallery, New York, ca. 1967

Ekow Eshun

Kwame Brathwaite said his goal was to show “the greatness of our people” and that’s what he did with his work. He understood that for Black people in the 1960s, a commitment to style and elegance and self-fashioning was not a superficial preoccupation. That’s why the slogan he popularized, “Black Is Beautiful,” was so resonant. It represented a personal politics of visibility and assertion. It was about resisting the white gaze and defining how you were seen on your own terms. It meant liberation. Black aliveness. This is what his photographs stand for. 

Ekow Eshun is a curator, writer, and regular contributor to Aperture. His latest book is In the Black Fantastic (2022).

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Janet Malcolm’s Life in Snapshots

“Taking a picture is a transformative act,” Janet Malcolm once wrote. As photography critic for the New Yorker from 1975 to 1981, she developed an understanding of the camera not as a mirror—that naïve, and now passé belief that photographs simply reflect reality—but instead as a light source: illuminating, even coloring, and leaving plenty in the shadows. “The images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same,” she reasoned. An artist herself, with collages and photographs exhibited and published, she was practiced in the ways the lens can transform.

Malcolm’s critical view is not Susan Sontag’s charge of photography as aggression; nor is it Roland Barthes’s dirge for what is no longer. Malcolm, who died in 2021, was drawn to the form for its confounding potency and evasive, expansive nature, particularly in quotidian images like the snapshot. She was interested in the chasm, not only between the eye and the camera, but between the images our eyes take in and what we later recall. Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, published posthumously at the beginning of this year, shows a writer drawn to the photo as it relates to memory, the ultimate object of Malcolm’s suspicion.

Malcolm’s grandmother, Klara, with Malcolm’s mother Hanna (left), and Malcolm’s aunt Jiřina (right), date unknown

Family photographs are a way into personal writing for Malcolm. Through the twenty-six vignettes that form Still Pictures, she follows almost as many images toward memories and associations that together form a life in snapshots. A portrait of Malcolm’s mother as a girl; neighbors and friends of her parents; “my bad-girl friend Francine”; a scene from Camp Happyacres; a family trip to Atlantic City; Malcolm grinning with her husband; Malcolm looking writerly in the 1990s, around the time she saw a speech coach to prepare for a libel lawsuit against her—these are just some of the images that “stir” Malcolm to remember.

Born Jana Klara Wienerova to a Jewish family in Prague in 1934, Malcolm and her family fled Nazism in 1939, and by the next year were living in a Czech neighborhood in Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Still Pictures includes tender moments and instances of Malcolm’s love of the absurd, a humor inherited especially from her father. One of two opening pictures shows a tiny Malcolm, age two or three, sitting on a step, her hands on her knees in an “assertive pose” that she finds interesting but that she cannot identify with. “If I were writing an autobiography, it would have to begin after the time of that photograph,” Malcolm writes. “My first memory dates from several years later.”

Malcolm at 2 or 3 years old, ca. 1936

Consummate eye-narrower and precise observer, Malcolm is perhaps best known in her writing for her authoritative persona and interrogation of the official narrative. Throughout a long career, she drew attention to the ways in which writing and reporting can be not only acts of transformation, but hostility. The opening of The Journalist and the Murderer—“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible”—is one of the better-known sentences in literary nonfiction (and though at first one of the more controversial, many now consider it conventional wisdom). And while Still Pictures treads some of this familiar territory (“Do we ever write about our parents without perpetuating a fraud?”), in her last book Malcolm flirts with the possibility of doing what she vowed she never would: autobiography.

“I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist,” Malcolm explained in 2010. “No one is dictating to me or posing for me now.” Through old family photos, Malcolm finds many a willing model, most of them conveniently dead. It is an appropriately oblique way in for a writer who saw autobiography as “an exercise in self-forgiveness,” as opposed to her unforgiving—and, according to Malcolm, unforgivable—work as a journalist. Photos allow Malcolm to make her way toward personal writing, but at times she still cheekily refuses to play. Recalling an ornate Italian plate she bought long ago to use in an apartment where she met the lover who would later become her husband, Malcolm writes: “What did it mean to me? Why did it come to mind after so many years? I know the answer, but—like a balky child—I find myself reluctant to give it. I would rather flunk a writing test than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”

Malcolm (middle) with her parents as they depart from Prague in 1939, date unknown

The creation of an honest former self always gave Malcolm serious pause. “Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection,” she noted in 2010. Critics have appraised the efficacy of Still Pictures as memoir (though apparently Malcolm did not characterize the essays as such), including Vivian Gornick, who wrote in the Nation, “After reading the collection, I felt obliged to agree with her. Malcolm does withhold affection from her long-ago self, and as a result the most important element in memoir writing—a satisfying persona—is missing.”

And yet, despite or because of this, in Still Pictures Malcolm follows memory’s lead—as if “simply by going with the camera instead of against it,” as she wrote in 1978 to describe when “photography went modernist.” The book could be said to mimic memory’s natural, often unsatisfying rhythms, embodying its inconsistencies, whims, repetitions, and blind spots. If Malcolm is a memoirist at once seduced and repulsed by memory, Still Pictures is a memoir that takes memory’s artistry as both muse and captor.

From left: Malcolm’s father, Malcolm’s sister Marie, 15-year-old Malcolm, and Malcolm’s mother, Atlantic City Boardwalk, June 12, 1949

Photography finds itself a partner to this reluctant but inspired tango with the past. “Most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” she writes. “The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” And yet, “Occasionally… like memory itself, one of these inert pictures will suddenly stir and come alive.” A memoir-in-snapshots may be the only form up to the task of “memory’s perversity.”

Though she never fully trusts memory to tell a good story, the sharp-eyed critic and journalist manages a memoir-in-snapshots by looking.

The book’s formal conceit could seem an apt conclusion to a fifty-five-year, career-long preoccupation. “People tell journalists their stories as characters in dreams deliver their elliptical messages,” Malcolm wrote in The Journalist and the Murderer, “without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them.” In Still Pictures: “as psychoanalysis has taught us, it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So, too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.” At the end of her writing life, Malcolm was as skeptical as ever about our ability to interpret our own lives. And yet, as both dreamer and journalist, she attempts to parse hers.

Malcolm with her second husband, Gardner Botsford, date unknown

One vignette, titled “Lovesick,” was stirred by an image of a group of high-schoolers found in a box in Malcolm’s apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” The number of times throughout the book Malcolm refers to love as a sickness, a virus “for which there is no vaccine,” a habit, a contagion, is striking. Letting her narratorial guard down briefly, she revels, almost childlike and at times approaching cliché, in life’s inexplicable timing and force, the elusiveness of what remains. Though she reports boredom at the randomness of what’s lost and what’s retained by memory, Malcolm was also clearly fascinated by the mystery, the art of it. Of her own collages, she once wrote to a colleague, “There does seem to be something occult going on here, and I don’t think I believe in the occult.” This tension is felt throughout Still Pictures.

In the introduction to Diana & Nikon, a 1980 collection of her photography criticism rich with literary reference, Malcolm describes the medium as at once fascinating and baffling—“Defying anyone to say what exactly its place in the arts is. The force of this singular orneriness is felt by every critic of photography and gives writing about photography its own peculiar atmosphere of unease and uncertainty.” Photography’s reputation as untrustworthy—elusive, even suspicious, implicated—would congeal during and after Malcolm’s days as a photo critic. (The title’s “Diana” refers to a plastic camera meant for hobbyists but taken up by artists such as Nancy Rexroth and Jo Ractliffe.) Decades later, in Still Pictures, Malcolm seems to trust the famously compromised medium to explore something more spacious than fact, some greater truth about time, subjectivity, and memory.

Gardner Botsford, Untitled, 1971
All photographs courtesy Janet Malcolm

Malcolm’s reliance on pictures from everyday personal collections allows for an intimate excavation of the chief concern of her photography criticism, after the medium’s relation to painting: how the artform was influenced by utilitarian uses of the camera like the snapshot. This was long before democratization via the smart phone, but around the time of the invention of the digital camera, a boon for amateur photographers. In the final vignette of Still Pictures, “A Work of Art,” Malcolm reveals that alongside her title essay in Diana & Nikon, which discusses the “deliberately artless photography” collected in Aperture’s Fall 1974 issue, “The Snapshot,” she snuck in an “outstandingly terrible snapshot” of a couple on a tennis court that her husband kept as a joke. That this random photo was printed without question alongside photographs by Rexroth, Joel Meyerowitz, and Robert Frank, inspired great delight in Malcolm.

A playful yet serious interest in authenticity animates Still Pictures. Who is the authority on our own lives? Malcolm had her answers and, daring finally to turn the lens on herself, she answers anew. Though she never fully trusts memory to tell a good story, the sharp-eyed critic and journalist manages a memoir-in-snapshots by looking, a skill long honed; then she follows memory, the ultimate absurdist artist.

Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023.

Aperture and Google’s Creator Labs Launch Second Season of Creator Labs Photo Fund

Today, Google’s Creator Labs and Aperture announce the second season of the Creator Labs Photo Fund—an initiative to support image makers.

The fund, made possible by Google Pixel in partnership with Aperture, will be distributed through a national open call, starting April 5 and running through May 1, 2023. Submissions will be free and open to any photographer or lens-based artist living in the United States, and thirty selected artists will be awarded a prize of $6,000 each. 

Aperture serves as an essential platform for artists, fostering critical dialogue within the photographic community—in print, in person, and online. “Partnering with Google on the second iteration of the Creator Labs Photo Fund embodies Aperture’s longstanding mission to surface and support new voices in photography,” says Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin. “We recognize the impact of images within our shared world and actively encourage and cultivate the creative exchange around this work.”

To apply to the Creator Labs Photo Fund, all entrants will need to submit eight to ten images from one body of work, showing a commitment to making a cohesive and compelling series or project. The project can be but does not need to be finished in order to enter. Entrants will not be evaluated on the basis of prior experience, publications, or exhibition history, but instead on the strength and originality of their visions.

To kick off season two, Aperture, Google’s Creator Labs, and SN37 are hosting a conversation on April 5. Senior managing editor of Aperture magazine, Brendan Embser, and associate editor at the Atlantic, Nicole Acheampong, will be in conversation with artists Adraint Bereal, Daveed Baptiste, and Sydney Mieko King. Each artist will share insight into their practice as recipients of the inaugural Creator Labs Photo Fund grant in 2021.

Submit now to the Creator Labs Photo Fund, open from April 5–May 1, 2023.

About the Creator Labs Photo Fund
Google’s Creator Labs Photo Fund was created out of a desire to extend the mission and message of Creator Labs to the wider creative community. It is increasingly important and vital to provide support to the creative community—to continue their practice, and have their narratives reverberate, for years to come. In 2021, twenty artists were selected by Aperture’s editors for the inaugural season of this fund, in recognition of the strength and originality of their portfolios. Each artist was awarded a prize of $5,000 to sustain their work and practice.

About the Creator Labs
Creator Labs is a partnership between Google and SN37 to support artists in the production of important personal work. Participating photographers and filmmakers are selected for their ability to author distinct, concentrated visual narratives with an authentic point of view. All work made through this program is created using Google Pixel.

A Celebratory Chronicle of Black College Life

Adraint Bereal is in a tight spot.

He spent much of 2021 on the road, taking more than a dozen flights, plus Amtraks, buses, and rental cars. He lived out of his suitcase for months, lugging along eight cameras—point-and-shoot, Polaroid, medium-format, “everything you could think of”—until the weight of all that gear wore him down. He shipped all but two home and kept going.

Bereal’s mission was heavy enough: to meet at least one hundred Black college students across the country, capture their lives in images and words—preferably their own—and compile this material in The Black Yearbook, the second iteration of a project Bereal birthed in his senior year at the University of Texas at Austin. Returning from his travels, he faced another, more challenging task: meet a book deadline. He needed to pare down hundreds of hours of conversation, toss aside thousands of images, and cull from intimate human stories to produce a selection that his publisher, Penguin Random House, could present for mass consumption. The tightest spot of all is how to tell his and his peers’ stories “without cutting away so much of ourselves,” he told me recently.

Bereal’s first photography endeavors occurred when he was a teenager in Waco, Texas, taking iPhone pictures of his mother’s outfits before she went out. “It sounds so silly,” he says, “but that was practice for me. I was learning about composition, learning how to have a conversation with not only the camera but the person in front of it as well.” The Black Yearbook, in a sense, is an evolution of his earliest image making, equal parts archive and affirmation.

Bereal’s project started from a desire to help his classmates see themselves and celebrate one another.

Photography wasn’t much more than a pastime until one of his college professors suggested Bereal check out the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. “I went to the Austin Public Library,” he remembers, “and there was one image in particular.” Bereal later shared the image, Forever Fortresses (1997), which captures Tillmans holding the hand of his late partner, Jochen Klein, just hours before Klein died of AIDS-related pneumonia. “Seeing that image, photography as an art form, the power of images, finally clicked for me.” Aside from their demonstration of technical mastery, Tillmans’s photographs gave Bereal a portal through which to explore his own queerness, to see and understand himself.

Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition: Nick Waplington Featuring a signed print by Nick Waplington, accompanied by a copy of Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live.”

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Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition: Nick Waplington

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View cart Description This print will be available for sale from March 28 through April 6 only. The number of prints acquired will be the number produced.

This Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition features a signed print by Nick Waplington, accompanied by a copy of Aperture 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live” for only $200.

This issue of the magazine explores the relationship between photography and storytelling across generations and geographies. Featuring stories that illuminate daily life, this issue evokes the late, celebrated writer Joan Didion, who declared, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and features a portfolio of Waplington’s work that includes this image. Aperture first published work from the Living Room project as a book in 1991. Spending years documenting the daily lives of two working-class families on a council estate in Nottingham, England, Waplington photographing in saturated color, weaved together a document of the lives of these families, capturing these often poignant intimate narratives, often with unexpected glimpses of humor.

“The Living Room project is one of my most well-known photographic works; the pictures were taken in Nottingham, England, roughly between 1986 and 1997, and two books from the project, Living Room and The Weddings were published in the 1990s by Aperture. The work deals with the daily existence of a group of families who lived in public housing in the city during the Thatcher years when the United Kingdom went through a series of radical social and political changes. Throughout this period, I would repeatedly return to the public housing projects where the families lived to stay with my grandfather, who had a house there. By 1992, when this picture was taken, some of my subjects had left the housing project and were living in Victorian housing near Nottingham city center. On a warm, sunny June afternoon, Dawn, the woman in the photograph, climbed on her boyfriend’s car roof and posed for me. Because it was so unique to the pictures I was making, I disregarded it at the time, but I came across it again recently as I reevaluated the work some thirty years later. Like the project as a whole, this image shows the fun and happy time we had back then, ‘mucking around in the street,’ as we say in England.”

—Nick Waplington

NOTE: Prints will begin to ship by April 26, 2023 Details

Radford, 1992
Pigment Print
Paper Size: 5 x 7 inches
Signed by the artist

Available for sale March 28—April 6

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The Black Yearbook project started from a similar desire: to help his classmates see themselves and celebrate one another on a campus where Black students comprise around 5 percent of the fifty-thousand-plus student body. The resulting crowdfunded 2020 publication resonated widely enough to spur him on his current journey to chronicle students’ lives beyond Texas. “This is the first time anybody has ever just sat down, shut up, and listened to what they had to say,” he states. He’s found striking, if sobering, similarities across the country. “Many of these students haven’t been taken care of on these campuses,” he tells me. Some don’t have proper housing, or a place to go back to for the holidays. Many students are struggling with mental health issues. Perhaps most obvious is the devastating effect of the pandemic. Bereal, who graduated in 2020—the first in his family to do so—participated in a virtual ceremony in lieu of a physical graduation. This is only one example of the ways in which he and his peers “had the rug pulled completely from underneath us.” Yet, he’s found much more than gloom. “Whether it be through a state of escapism or delusion, there are some students who are absolutely enjoying themselves,” Bereal observes.

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Images from homecoming at the University of Texas embody Bereal’s approach and illuminate the lives that fill The Black Yearbook. There’s one of the homecoming queen herself—flash galore, from the camera to her smile, her makeup highlights, her red nails, her glittering tiara. Echoes of the fit pic, with the patina of a 1990s family photograph. “I’m having a really voyeuristic moment,” Bereal says, “but I’m also participating in it, hanging out with my friends and just dancing with everyone.”

In Bereal’s practice, the photographer is comrade and chronicler, griot and visual artist. He walks the tightrope that stretches between the I and the we, engaging in the noble struggle to get the balance right and, most of all, to tell the truth, to capture the agony and ecstasy and in-between of what it is to be a Black college student today.

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This kaleidoscopic hunger helps explain the variety in Bereal’s images. Starting from a foundation of portraits, he seems as drawn to the disposable-camera-esque candid as he is to the high-gloss, highly staged ad. He is a poet of the party scene—some of Bereal’s photographs call to mind the crowded, joyful abandon of Ernie Barnes’s iconic 1976 painting The Sugar Shack—as well as the selfie, which he considers “an affirmation of self,” recalling one of the positive things to come out of the COVID-19 lockdown. “When the pandemic happened, I spent a lot of time with myself. And it forced me to look in the mirror and say, ‘All right, this is who I am. I don’t always feel good. I don’t always feel pretty. I don’t always feel handsome. But I still love myself.’”

For Bereal, this love includes kindness toward himself and toward his fellow artists, whose development, he fears, might be stifled by the paralyzing effects of too-early criticism and the capitalist pressure to build a “brand,” if only because one has to pay rent and student loans, et cetera. “I’m still so young,” the twenty-four-year-old says, “and I really hope that people I respect give me the grace to grow and learn as an artist.”

All photographs by Adraint Bereal from the series The Black Yearbook, 2020–21
Courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live.”