Aperture's Blog, page 34

Aperture Celebrates 70 Years at Its 2022 Gala

On October 17, Aperture’s annual fundraising gala celebrated the organization’s seventieth anniversary and the wide breadth of Aperture’s influence on the field of photography. Acknowledging this milestone, Executive Director Sarah Meister introduced a short video celebrating Aperture: “Since its founding seventy years ago, Aperture has been an inspiration and a guide for photo-curious people everywhere. I am proud to lead an organization supporting artists and shaping the conversation around the ways in which photographs help us see one another and our world more clearly.”

Jeffrey Hoone, Hank Willis Thomas, Deb Willis, Lyle Ashton Harris, Sarah Meister, Dawoud Bey, Cheryl Finley, Colette Veasey-Cullors, Kwame S. Brathwaite, Nicole Fleetwood, Ari Marcopoulos, and Kara Walker

Gala Co-chairs Yesim Philip, Antwaun Sargent, Kara Ross, and Helen Nitkin, with Cathy Kaplan and Sarah Meister (center)

Stuart Cooper, Becky Besson, Sheela Murty, and Vasant Nayak

Judy Glickman Lauder, Celso Gonzalez Falla, and Cathy M. Kaplan

Antwaun Sargent, Deb Willis, Tyler Mitchell, and Cheryl Finley

Sarah Meister, Tom Schiff, and Mary Ellen Göke

Wesley Garlington

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The night served as a joyous moment of reflection and an opportunity to look forward to exciting advancements. The event was co-chaired by Helen Nitkin, Yesim Philip, Kara Ross, and Antwaun Sargent, and coincides with the “70th Anniversary” issue of Aperture magazine released last month, which explores the uniqueness of this moment. The issue features original commissions by leading artists and photographers alongside celebrated, incisive writers who were tasked with exploring the Aperture archive. The result, editors of the magazine note, “reveal[s] that however much photography and this magazine evolved, sometimes radically, Aperture remained committed to thinking about the meanings of pictures, and all that might encompass.”

The evening also looked ahead to Aperture’s future home, a new space located on the Upper West Side that will serve as a hub for connecting artists and ideas with members of Aperture’s expanding community. The move will take place in 2024, and act as the home base for the organization’s production of the flagship magazine alongside books, exhibitions, limited-edition prints, public programming, and digital initiatives. In welcoming remarks from the night, chair of the board of trustees Cathy M. Kaplan said enthusiastically, “It marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter in Aperture’s long and distinguished history.”

Lesley A. Martin and Tim DavisTim Davis, Matthew Porter, and Hannah WhitakerCelso Gonzalez-Falla and Camille ClechMatt and Martha SharpKate Cordsen and Marie AielloVirginia Shearer and Peter BarberieTommy Kha and Phil TaylorRichard RenaldiAdraint Bereal, Brendan Embser, Cassidy Paul, Stephen Molina Contreras, Gus Aronson, and Silvana TrevaleSarah Meister, Elizabeth Kahane, and Rebecca Bengal
Photographs courtesy The Self Portrait Project Steven Contreras, Philip Montgomery, and Myriam Boulos

The night began with a cocktail hour featuring drinks from Tito’s Handmade Vodka and Stella Artois Beer and a silent auction of limited-edition prints from Aperture’s commemorative 70 x 70 print sale. As guests transitioned to dinner upstairs, they were welcomed by Aperture staff members and remarks from Meister, Kaplan, and Aperture Creative Director Lesley A. Martin.

Dinner was served by PINCH and guests enjoyed musical sets by Wesley Garlington, Matt Ray, Danton Boller, and Joél Mateo. An additional live auction led by Christie’s followed dinner featuring works by Sebastião Salgado, Sally Mann, Nan Goldin, An-My Lê, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Richard Learoyd.

The celebration continued into the night at the Aperture Etcetera Afterparty with lively DJ sets from artists Awol Erizku and Stefan Ruiz. The Self Portrait Project’s unique photo booth captured the celebratory mood of the night while guests danced the night away over drinks and dessert.
Proceeds from the Gala support Aperture’s Stevan A. Baron Work Scholar program, award-winning publications, educational initiatives, exhibitions, and public programming. You can still support Aperture’s essential work here.

Dr. Arlen Cullors and Collette Veasey-CullorsElizabeth and William Kahane Jon Stryker, Sarah Meister, and Slobodan RandjelovićDawoud Bey and Cathy M. KaplanPeter Barbur and Tim DoodyDavid Leven and Stella BettsAwol Erizku

In Tavares Strachan’s Collages, Double Meanings and Colliding Histories

The artist Tavares Strachan makes enormous neon sculptures, immersive installations, and accumulative two-dimensional series that layer historical photographs of monarchs, explorers, and musicians over and under drawings, advertising images, traditional geometric patterns, and technological glitches such as the smudges from a printing error or the wavy lines and test patterns of television broadcast interruptions. His best-known projects take performance to an outrageously global, even cosmic scale—moving a four-and-a-half-ton block of ice from the Alaskan Arctic to a freezer in the courtyard of his Bahamian elementary school, in 2006, or placing a 24-karat gold canopic jar bearing the bust of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut chosen for a national space program, into a SpaceX rocket that has been orbiting Earth since 2018.

Tavares Strachan, Rocket, 2018, from the series Notes on Exploration

Strachan speaks of his work in terms of a West African street festival where dance, poetry, music, and the performing arts are jumbled together in an exuberant whole. It’s hard for him to separate out any one medium, to speak of photography, say, or sculpture, in isolation from his other modes of making. As he explained to me one day in early June, speaking from his studio in New York, so much of what he is trying to do, as someone who was raised in an Afro Caribbean home (he grew up in the Bahamian capital of Nassau) but graduated from high powered Western institutions (RISD, Yale), is about reconnecting the experiential elements of the former that were pulled apart by the organizational systems (and colonial undertones) of the latter.

Tavares Strachan, No Name in the Street, 2020 Tavares Strachan, It is Better in the Bahamas, 2018, from the series Notes on Exploration

Strachan compares the process of making the pieces in series such as Notes on Exploration and The Children’s History of Invisibility (both 2018) to the loose structures of 1960s jazz, “with a little bit of dub and a little bit of hip-hop,” he says, adding that “those genres speak to each other.” They respond to a rift or a clue. “I think, visually, I’m doing something similar with images, textures, the pieces of a story.” These works have the appearance of large-scale collage, but more often than not, they are made from images printed on layers of Mylar and vinyl mounted on acrylic or museum board. Strachan also calls them poems, assembled from a language that is never innocent or transparent but can be wrestled into a form that speaks to (and about) systems of power.

Tavares Strachan, The Stranger, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

A work such as The Stranger (2018), for example, might begin with an image of Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia who galvanized public opinion, inspired the Rastafarian movement, and, incidentally but tellingly, kept massive pet cheetahs as his preferred symbols of power. From there, Strachan builds the surface sonically, adding a delicate line drawing of a maze; a Lion of Judah flag, which he used to see everywhere in his neighborhood as a kid growing up; a Life magazine cover featuring the astronaut John Glenn alongside a headline about women’s intimate apparel; and a photograph of himself in a cosmonaut suit, his head obscured by an oversized, performative mask. He’s particularly drawn to materials with double meanings, such as Native American textile patterns that not only are decorative but also serve as maps or other such communication channels.

“Duality allows for a certain level of elasticity in how we think about the world,” Strachan says. “Instead of spending all this time thinking about how we are different, it allows for thinking about sameness, about overlapping and intersecting, about all kinds of complexity. My own history, my erased history through colonialism, my new history as someone who’s been living in the United States for some time in a society that wants you to decide you are one thing or another—all of that goes into the work.”

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This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies.”

Hank Willis Thomas’s Tribute to the Photographers Who Inspire His Vision

For Aperture‘s “70th Anniversary” issue, seven photographers were invited to consider a single issue, an article, an idea, or even an omission, from a decade of the magazine’s history. In an original commission, Hank Willis Thomas reflects on the 2010s.

Kwame Brathwaite, the Harlem photographer who helped popularize the clarion slogan “Black is beautiful,” was known as the “Keeper of the Images.” His pictures of Black models and musicians from the 1960s are essential documents that radiated from New York during an era of Black and African independence campaigns. Although known to scholars and archivists, Brathwaite’s work didn’t reach a wider audience until Aperture’s 2017 “Elements of Style” issue. As an elder statesman of the Black freedom movement, Brathwaite became the “keeper of the stories, too,” Tanisha C. Ford wrote. “If he didn’t share this history, it would be lost to time.”

Hank Willis Thomas, Wendy Ewald & Eric Gottesman: We’re Talking About Life and Culture, 2022 Hank Willis Thomas, Dave Swindells: Taking pictures definitely kept me going, 2022

The artist Hank Willis Thomas is also a keeper of the images. “Sometimes I see myself as a visual-culture archaeologist or DJ,” he explains. “All of my work is about framing and context.” In this series of collages, which reference traditional quilt patterning, Thomas draws on stories from Aperture in the 2010s, a decade during which looking back was as vital as looking forward. He sets in kaleidoscopic motion an energetic range of associations and styles: Joel Meyerowitz’s stately portraits from Provincetown in the era before AIDS and Nick Sethi’s dizzying chronicle of a festival for a transgender community in India; Renée Cox’s self-portraits about power and Dave Swindells’s endless nights on London’s dance floors. Revivifying history, remixing the present. Thomas sees these collages as a collaboration with peers and mentors he’s long admired. “The process of weaving these images has been revelatory,” he says. “Through this blending, I was able to engage more intimately with the images, the subject matter, and the journey of the image maker.”

Hank Willis Thomas, Joel Meyerowitz: On the Beach , 2022 Hank Willis Thomas, Robert Voit: New Trees, 2022 Hank Willis Thomas, Renée Cox: A Taste of Power, 2022 Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Sethi: The Third Gender, 2022
All photographs for Aperture. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue.”

Can the Photo-album Hold Cultures Together?

Last May, my children discovered my photo-album from college. As they laughed at images of me in my early twenties wearing big twist outs and patterned head wraps, or of their dad with his tight fade and tighter shirts, I realized how unfamiliar to them this intimate object of mine was. For me, each plastic-covered page revealed one or more carefully curated stories from my young adulthood. In contrast, my daughter, who was born in 2012, and my son, born in 2015, saw the album quite differently. For them, it was a random assortment of images and an artifact that offered a glimpse into their parents’ yesteryear.

But that experience was also a rite of passage. As they visited my early adulthood, I flashbacked to my own poring over of my parents’ albums when I was a child in the 1980s. Unbeknownst to me at that time, I was, in fact, participating in an intergenerational ritual that I would later share with my own children: the impromptu celebration of the family archive.

Covers of Aperture: Spring 2013, with photograph by Christopher Williams; Spring 2015, with photograph by Ren Hang; Summer 2016, with photograph by Awol Erizku

In many ways, my children’s curiosity was part of a larger trend. While the physical photo-album itself seems to have been replaced with Instagram feeds or camera phone folders, it has simultaneously been repurposed. Now, it is less a method to freeze time and more a muse for artists in their own contemporary practices. I imagine this turn is, in part, an intervention into the rise of the selfie as a primary means of personal expression and social-media influence in the 2010s. Lest we forget: Kim Kardashian’s photobook, Selfish, featuring countless selfies of Kardashian traveling, with her family, and in swimsuits, was a New York Times bestseller in 2015.

Rather than compete with spectacle and surplus, contemporary photographers have revived an even earlier form—the portrait—to enact everyday protest.

Whereas the selfie emerged in the last decade as our ultimate symbol in an era of instant access and casual self-importance, the picture album, as a series of either snapshots or collective self-portraits, suddenly felt far humbler and more intimate. Though the Russian Ghanaian photographer Liz Johnson Artur has been documenting the everyday lives of Black immigrants in London, Brooklyn, Kingston, and Accra for more than three decades, the album was the conceit she used when she chose to connect these images together in The Black Balloon Archive, on ongoing series that she began in 1991. Described by Ekow Eshun in the Winter 2018 Aperture as “a family album for the diaspora,” this format enabled Johnson Artur to capture multiple people, periods, and places. Seeing her subjects as “my neighbors,” she visualizes the feeling of Black belonging, offering them a home space in which each can gather together, as Eshun notes, “on one’s own terms.”

Such inclusion was not always guaranteed. In its earliest conception, the family album indicated the wealthy economic status and high social standing of the Victorian-era elite in the 1850s. A hundred years later, photo technology had advanced so much that the baby-boomer generation saw photographs as indispensable. But in today’s world, “What does that same device have to offer the contemporary artist?” as artist Carmen Winant asked in “Into the Album,” her essay that also appeared in the Winter 2018 issue. “In what ways can the family photo-album behave as a kind of confirmation—or assertion—of our very survival, dignity, and existence?”

Kimonwan Metchewais, Raincloud, 2010, from Aperture, Fall 2020
Courtesy the Kimowan [McLain] Metchewais Collection, NMAI. National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution

As a contemporary artist herself, Winant ended up turning to Glenn Ligon’s much earlier queering of the family album in A Feast of Scraps (1994–98) and Lorraine O’Grady’s disrupting of linearity in her Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994) as both radical reclamations of the genre as well as inspirations for Winant’s own feminist practice. Likewise, Jack Halberstam reminds us of the family album as a counter-archive. In his Winter 2017 Aperture essay, “Eric’s Ego Trip,” he writes about the powerful gift that Reed Erickson, a wealthy, white trans man known for his philanthropy, gave to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, in Los Angeles.

I find optimism in the desire among contemporary artists and scholars to resurrect this family genre. Their considerations of these older photo-albums are not overly sentimental or nostalgic. Instead, they turn to this earlier format to better reflect our ever-expansive notions of gender, race, sexuality, and belonging, and to reject those racially homogenous and heteronormative notions of the American family that continue to thwart us as a nation.

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And yet, the 2010s were also the decade of the spectacular. In addition to selfies, there was no shortage of random, often viral, images for us to click, like, or upload. At the same time, such distractions did nothing to ease the grief, and rage, that we felt as we watched unarmed Black people being killed by the police online or played on a twenty-four-hour loop.

In this “information overabundance,” as Fred Ritchin lamented on these pages in the winter of 2012, such excess made it difficult for us “to focus on any one image, or set of images.” In other words, the proliferation of photos and video content ended up minimizing the power of a single picture and its ability to foment activism akin to that of the civil rights and the antiwar movements of the 1960s. Instead, the oversaturation compromised “the credibility and authenticity of photographs that purport to frame the real,” he wrote. In such an age, only the viral video, like the one heroically filmed by seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier of George Floyd’s murder, has inspired mass protest.

But rather than compete with spectacle and surplus, contemporary photographers have revived an even earlier form—the portrait—to enact everyday protest. Across Aperture issues from this decade, the ordinary is the alternative to oversaturation.

Farah Al Qasimi, Arun (Rose Studios Satwa), 2014, from Aperture, Winter 2016
Courtesy the artist

The large-scale portrait is the medium of choice for Farah Al Qasimi, a photographer and native of the United Arab Emirates. Her bright, color-saturated images of people at beauty salons, shopping malls, and traditional pharmacies in her home country have become her signature style and were exhibited in 2020 on one hundred New York bus shelters. “Her Instagram feed is a glorious mix of high art and everyday image inundation,” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote of her work in the magazine’s Winter 2016 issue, “On Feminism.” “And between them, the boundaries are blurred.”

This dissolution between the real and the staged is also a defining trait of four very different artists—Kimowan Metchewais, Zanele Muholi, Buck Ellison, and Tyler Mitchell—whose portraits are revelatory. Though Cree artist Metchewais passed away in 2011, Aperture’s more recent reprisals of his work affirm the power of the small photograph self-portrait to upend longstanding racial stereotypes. His specific use of Polaroid portraits not only afforded him a malleable medium to dissect, rearrange, and then display on large-scale paper but also gave him a “visual sovereignty” that contested the willful erasure of and violence against Indigenous communities by the State. Muholi’s Brave Beauties (2014), on the other hand, is a series of portraits about Black trans women in South Africa that calls attention to the way in which Black queer or lesbian South Africans are vulnerable to gender-based violence. “Today, lesbians in South Africa are brutally murdered,” Muholi told Deborah Willis for Aperture’s Spring 2015 issue, “Queer.” “‘Curative rape’ is used on us. That forces me to redefine what visual activism is.” Muholi adds, “Art needs to be political—or let me say that my art is political. It’s not for show. It’s not for play.”

Buck Ellison, Untitled (Family Portrait), 2017, from Aperture, Fall 2017
Courtesy the artist

In contrast, Ellison uses models to re-create those intimate moments among the white elite in which racial and class hierarchies are reinscribed. And by giving us access to the inner worlds of such white privilege, Ellison reveals and gravely reminds us how power is informally yet consistently wielded, even in the prosaic space of a dressing room or family driveway.

And in the decade-ending “Utopia” issue, I had the good fortune of exploring how Mitchell’s aesthetic flips white privilege on its head. He lingers in the imaginative possibilities of Blackness, often capturing his friends and fashion icons from throughout the African diaspora in relaxed settings and in nature. “Inherent to photography, especially when you think of it historically, is a strong hierarchy, where the photographer is the one with all the power, the one who is seeing,” he told me. “And the person being seen has almost no power. So, for me personally as a photographer, I ask myself, ‘What are the things I can do to lessen these inherent hierarchies in the photography-shoot structure of seeing and being seen?’” In his oeuvre, the wide-scale portraits become landscapes in which Black people find a haven, and the ability to rest is rendered as justice.

As for my children, they are now obsessed with the technologies of their age. TikTok, Zoom backgrounds, and iPad screenshots are their preferred forms of self-expression. As I struggle to find a way to store those images, I have begun to print out a select few from my phone and put them in our brand-new photo-albums as a way of safeguarding our memories for the future.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” under the title “Everyday People.”

Saul Leiter’s Ravishing Color Photographs of New York

Among the great or later-to-be-great New York photographers of the middle of the last century, Saul Leiter bested them all in caring the least about fame or legacy.

“I wasn’t burdened by importance,” he said a few years before his death in 2013, synopsizing a devotion to unfettered autonomy that has itself come to shape his legacy. What his reticence meant, practically speaking, was that many thousands of the pictures he took over almost seven decades were never developed, printed, or seen during his lifetime, despite the fame that came thundering to his doorstep with the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color. “Before he died, he said that what we had seen of his work was just the tip of the iceberg, and we’re really only now finding out what he meant,” said Michael Parillo, the associate director of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has been hard at work to bring more of Leiter’s color photography into the world.

These previously unpublished selections of 35mm slides confirm and extend our sense of the stubborn singularity of Leiter’s color language. You might occasionally mistake a Stephen Shore for a William Eggleston or a Helen Levitt for an Evelyn Hofer, but it’s not easy to see a Leiter for anything else. His quietly elaborate layering of urban surfaces and his predilection for puncta such as red umbrellas, traffic lights, gently sloping car tops, and fractured window lettering are as instantly recognizable as a Giorgio Morandi bottle—as is Leiter’s enduring subject, the East Village neighborhood where he spent almost his entire adult life. Leiter wasn’t exactly a visual hermit; he took pictures in Paris and Rome, Brooklyn and Harlem. But his principal ambit was tightly and purposively bounded, the dozen or so blocks around his modest artist’s-garret apartment, streets he turned into the whole world, a photographer’s rendition of William Carlos Williams’s localist modernism.

It was a happy accident to see these unknown Leiter pictures for the first time last fall, during the run of Luigi Ghirri: The Idea of Building, a highly focused look at the work of the Italian photographer, organized by the painter Matt Connors at Matthew Marks Gallery. Connors writes that Ghirri, working from within Conceptualism, was “reading the physical world but also writing it,” making images that reassemble the built landscape recursively within the frame of the lens. Leiter, emerging from Abstract Expressionism, accomplished something strikingly similar on his own terms, rapidly and somehow instinctively on the street and then deliberatively in the editing, though he remained coy about his own considerable powers of stage management.

“I believe that there is something in you that strives for order and within that order there’s a certain kind of mishmashy confusion, and you bring this mishmashy confusion, if you succeed, into some kind of order,” he said. “There’s an element of control. There’s also an element that just kind of happens, if you’re very lucky.”

Leiter was the kind of artist who established the conditions for that luck, earning, as Emily Dickinson put it, “fortune’s expensive smile.”

All photographs by Saul Leiter, Untitled, early 1950s–1961
Courtesy the Saul Leiter Foundation

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York.”

Mark Steinmetz Portrays the Gestures of Love between Mother and Daughter

For Aperture‘s “70th Anniversary” issue, seven photographers were invited to consider a single issue, an article, an idea, or even an omission, from a decade of the magazine’s history. In an original commission, Mark Steinmetz reflects on the 1980s.

“Mothers and daughters! Are there any fantasies or ideal images left to us in this tough-minded age of psychological realism?” So begins the historian Estelle Jussim’s essay for Aperture’s Summer 1987 issue, “Mothers & Daughters,” a catalog in magazine form that accompanied a traveling exhibition of photographs about mother-daughter relationships. “That Special Quality,” the suggestive subtitle offers—is it a definition or a dare? The issue is organized neither chronologically nor typologically. It’s not ethnographic or sentimental. Yet “Mothers & Daughters” relies on both of photography’s elemental impulses: the desire to see others and the desire to memorialize. There are lines of poetry by Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Alice Walker. There are backyards, weddings, beaches, kitchens, embraces, American flags, sashes that read “Votes for Women,” looks of impatience, and gazes for posterity.

Mark Steinmetz, Amelia, Athens, GA, February, 2021

Mark Steinmetz began taking pictures of his wife, the photographer Irina Rozovsky, and their daughter, Amelia, in 2017, when Amelia was an infant. While looking through “Mothers & Daughters,” Steinmetz was thinking about the 1980s as a time when the domestic became a concern in photography: Aperture’s issue preceded the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort by four years. Among the portraits by Robert Adams, Judith Black, Jill Freedman, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and many others presented by Aperture, Steinmetz was drawn to a street picture by Garry Winogrand—the concluding note of the issue—of a woman walking outside a Doubleday bookshop on Fifth Avenue in New York, distracted yet propulsive, a small child on her back, a beaming daughter holding her hand. “I don’t think I’m a nostalgic person,” Steinmetz says of the photographs he made of Amelia’s young life and the gestures of love between mother and daughter. “I got married, and we had a baby. So, I’m just photographing around me. It’s inevitable. I also think my daughter is a star.”

Mark Steinmetz, Amelia, Jersey City, NJ, September, 2019Mark Steinmetz, Sledding, Commerce, GA, January, 2022Mark Steinmetz, Our Kitchen Window, Athens, GA, August, 2020Mark Steinmetz, Amelia’s Shadow, Athens, GA, October, 2020 Mark Steinmetz, Amelia, Athens, GA, March, 2021Mark Steinmetz, Irina and Amelia, Jamaica Plain, MA, March, 2017Mark Steinmetz, Amelia, Paso Robles, CA, December, 2018. All photographs from the series Irina & Amelia, 2017–ongoing, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue.”

Hannah Whitaker’s Images About Technology and Anxiety at the Turn of the Millennium

For Aperture‘s “70th Anniversary” issue, seven photographers were invited to consider a single issue, an article, an idea, or even an omission, from a decade of the magazine’s history. In an original commission, Hannah Whitaker reflects on the 2000s.

The language of technological innovation is tinged with anxiety and awe. Its vision recasts us as beneficiaries of a more connected humanity—somehow both more human and more than human—yet its promise often feels suspect. In a review of William A. Ewing’s 2004 exhibition About Face, which proclaimed the death of the photographic portrait, Vince Aletti writes in the pages of Aperture’s Winter 2004 issue: “Even before photography’s documentary credibility was deliberately and irrevocably eroded from within, pictures of our fellow humans had been stripped of virtually all pretense to revelation, insight, or any but the most superficial emotional content.”

This skepticism frames Hannah Whitaker’s silhouetted portraits and still lifes, which address an unease, pervasive in the twenty-first century, about how technology relates to our humanity.

Seemingly familiar human figures are obscured and manipulated into dark, synthetic forms. “I wanted to make photographs that center around a particular face, without actually depicting it,” Whitaker states. Using mirrors, long exposures, reflective materials, special lighting, and anthropomorphized arrangements, her work treats technology as a medium as well as an aesthetic position. Many images employ digital interventions to conceal, dislocate, or duplicate human appendages, a response to technology’s tendency to fragment our everyday experiences and evacuate meaning in the service of data. In their stark contrasts, these “portraits” carry a menacing subtext within their outlines and an all-too-human trepidation in the face of disorienting change—a feeling as relevant today as it was decades ago.

All photographs by Hannah Whitaker from the series Millennium Pictures, 2022, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

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Aperture 248

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue.”

Hannah Whitaker’s Images About Technology at the Turn of the Millennium

For Aperture‘s “70th Anniversary” issue, seven photographers were invited to consider a single issue, an article, an idea, or even an omission, from a decade of the magazine’s history. In an original commission, Hannah Whitaker reflects on the 2000s.

The language of technological innovation is tinged with anxiety and awe. Its vision recasts us as beneficiaries of a more connected humanity—somehow both more human and more than human—yet its promise often feels suspect. In a review of William A. Ewing’s 2004 exhibition About Face, which proclaimed the death of the photographic portrait, Vince Aletti writes in the pages of Aperture’s Winter 2004 issue: “Even before photography’s documentary credibility was deliberately and irrevocably eroded from within, pictures of our fellow humans had been stripped of virtually all pretense to revelation, insight, or any but the most superficial emotional content.”

This skepticism frames Hannah Whitaker’s silhouetted portraits and still lifes, which address an unease, pervasive in the twenty-first century, about how technology relates to our humanity.

Seemingly familiar human figures are obscured and manipulated into dark, synthetic forms. “I wanted to make photographs that center around a particular face, without actually depicting it,” Whitaker states. Using mirrors, long exposures, reflective materials, special lighting, and anthropomorphized arrangements, her work treats technology as a medium as well as an aesthetic position. Many images employ digital interventions to conceal, dislocate, or duplicate human appendages, a response to technology’s tendency to fragment our everyday experiences and evacuate meaning in the service of data. In their stark contrasts, these “portraits” carry a menacing subtext within their outlines and an all-too-human trepidation in the face of disorienting change—a feeling as relevant today as it was decades ago.

All photographs by Hannah Whitaker from the series Millennium Pictures, 2022, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

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Aperture 248

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue.”

Announcing the 2022 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—a celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. The award recognizes excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.

“We are very proud to celebrate ten years of the PhotoBook Awards on this twenty-fifth anniversary of Paris Photo and the seventieth anniversary of Aperture,” comments Florence Bourgeois, director of Paris Photo. “It is a delight to witness each year what this award means to the photography community, through the number and quality of entries received, but also through the ongoing enthusiasm around this medium that remains a central part of the Fair, bringing together so many artists, publishers, collectors, and enthusiasts alike.”

This year’s shortlist selection was made by a jury comprising: Clinton Cargill, visual editor, the New York Times; Lesley A. Martin, creative director, Aperture; Miwa Susuda, Dashwood Books; publisher, Session Press; Brian Wallis, executive director, Center for Photography at Woodstock; and Leslie M. Wilson, associate director for Academic Engagement and Research, Art Institute of Chicago.

Wilson observed about the process, “The shortlist jury is an opportunity to see what kind of books are being made today. With so many books to consider, one gets a strong sense that you’re in touch with the pulse of what photography can be in this moment.”

The total number of books received this year was a robust tally of 1,026, a remarkable increase in entries from the initial years of the awards (a little more than six hundred titles were entered in 2012). Jurying the PhotoBook Awards takes part in two stages. The first took place at Aperture in New York, September 19–21, 2022, a process that involved the initial review of submissions in order to select the thirty-five shortlisted books in all categories.

A final jury will gather at Paris Photo this November to select and announce the winners for all three prizes. From there, shortlisted and winning titles will be profiled in a printed catalogue, to be released and distributed for free during Paris Photo fair, along with the Winter 2022 issue of Aperture magazine. The shortlisted books will be exhibited at the Grand Palais Éphémère during Paris Photo, and will tour internationally thereafter.

Below, see the thirty-five selected titles for the 2022 PhotoBook Awards shortlist.

First PhotoBook

Hiske Altena, Vital Mud, Self-published, Amsterdam

Gabriella Angotti-Jones, I Just Wanna Surf, Mass Books, New York

Florian Bachmeier, In Limbo, Buchkunst Berlin

Oscar B. Castillo, ESOS QUE SABEN (Those who know), Raya Editorial, Manizales, Colombia

Phyllis Christopher, Dark Room, Book Works, London

Sabiha Çimen, HAFIZ, Red Hook Editions, New York

Craig Easton, Bank Top, GOST Books, London

Philippe Jarrigeon, PLAY, RVB Books, Paris

Hari Katragadda and Shweta Upadhyay, I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you, Self-published in association with Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi

Stacy Kranitz, As It Was Give(n) to Me, Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Youqine Lefèvre, The Land of Promises, The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Carla Liesching, Good Hope, MACK, London

Sabelo Mlangeni, Isivumelwano, Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Marilyn Nance, Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos, CARA, New York, and Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg

Zuzana Pustaiova, One Day Every Day, Reflektor (self-published), Vienna / Slovakia

Paola Jiménez Quispe, Rules for Fighting (Reglas para pelear), Images Vevey, Switzerland, and Witty Books, Turin, Italy

Yoshinori Saito, After the Snowstorm, the(M) éditions, Paris, and IBASHO, Antwerp, Belgium

Marc Schroeder, Order 7161, The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Patrick Wack, Dust, André Frère Éditions, Marseille, France

D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Contact High, MACK, London

Previous Next

Hiske Altena
Vital Mud
Self-published, Amsterdam

Gabriella Angotti-Jones
I Just Wanna Surf
Mass Books, New York

Florian Bachmeier
In Limbo
Buchkunst Berlin

Oscar B. Castillo
ESOS QUE SABEN (Those who know)
Raya Editorial, Manizales, Colombia

Phyllis Christopher
Dark Room
Book Works, London

Sabiha Çimen
HAFIZ
Red Hook Editions, New York

Craig Easton
Bank Top
GOST Books, London

Philippe Jarrigeon
PLAY
RVB Books, Paris

Hari Katragadda and Shweta Upadhyay
I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you
Self-published in association with Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi

Stacy Kranitz
As It Was Give(n) to Me
Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Youqine Lefèvre
The Land of Promises
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Carla Liesching
Good Hope
MACK, London

Sabelo Mlangeni
Isivumelwano
Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Marilyn Nance
Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos
CARA, New York, and Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg

Zuzana Pustaiova
One Day Every Day
Reflektor (self-published), Vienna / Slovakia

Paola Jiménez Quispe
Rules for Fighting (Reglas para pelear)
Images Vevey, Switzerland, and Witty Books, Turin, Italy

Yoshinori Saito
After the Snowstorm
the(M) éditions, Paris, and IBASHO, Antwerp, Belgium

Marc Schroeder
Order 7161
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Patrick Wack
Dust
André Frère Éditions, Marseille, France

D’Angelo Lovell Williams
Contact High
MACK, London

PhotoBook of the Year

Karl Bassil, in collaboration with Negar Azimi and Katia Boyadjian, Becoming Van Leo, Arab Image Foundation, Beirut, and Archive Books, Berlin

Mohamed Bourouissa, Périphérique, Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Jess T. Dugan, Look at me like you love me, MACK, London

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Flint Is Family in Three Acts, Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, and The Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York

Curran Hatleberg, River’s Dream, TBW Books, Oakland, California

Justine Kurland, SCUMB Manifesto, MACK, London

Baldwin Lee, Baldwin Lee, Hunters Point Press, New York

Tokuko Ushioda, My Husband, torch press, Tokyo

Carmen Winant, Arrangements, SPBH Editions, London, and Images Vevey, Switzerland

Yelena Yemchuk, УYY, Départ Pour l’Image, Milan

Previous Next

Karl Bassil, in collaboration with Negar Azimi and Katia Boyadjian
Becoming Van Leo
Arab Image Foundation, Beirut, and Archive Books, Berlin

Mohamed Bourouissa
Périphérique
Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Jess T. Dugan
Look at me like you love me
MACK, London

LaToya Ruby Frazier
Flint Is Family in Three Acts
Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, and The Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York

Curran Hatleberg
River’s Dream
TBW Books, Oakland, California

Justine Kurland
SCUMB Manifesto
MACK, London

Baldwin Lee
Baldwin Lee
Hunters Point Press, New York

Tokuko Ushioda
My Husband
torch press, Tokyo

Carmen Winant
Arrangements
SPBH Editions, London, and Images Vevey, Switzerland

Yelena Yemchuk  
УYY
Départ Pour l’Image, Milan

Photography Catalogue of the Year

Another Country: British Documentary Photography since 1945, Gerry Badger, Thames & Hudson, London

Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, Makeda Best, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Diane Arbus Documents, Max Rosenberg, ed., David Zwirner Books, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

James Barnor: Stories. Pictures from the Archive (1947–1987) , LUMA Foundation, Arles, and Maison CF, Paris

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, Roxana Marcoci, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Previous Next

Another Country: British Documentary Photography since 1945
Gerry Badger
Thames & Hudson, London

Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970
Makeda Best
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Diane Arbus Documents
Max Rosenberg, ed.  
David Zwirner Books, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

James Barnor: Stories. Pictures from the Archive (1947–1987)
LUMA Foundation, Arles, and Maison CF, Paris

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear
Roxana Marcoci
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Special Juror’s Mention: PhotoBooks for Ukraine

Jim Goldberg and Iryna Tsilyk, Another Life, STANLEY/BARKER, London

Katya Lesiv, I Love You, IST Publishing, Kyiv

Émeric Lhuisset, Ukraine — Hundred Hidden Faces, Paradox, Edam, Netherlands, and André Frère Éditions, Marseille, France

Katerina Motylova, Loss, Self-published, Kyiv, Ukraine

Mark Neville, Stop Tanks with Books, Nazraeli Press, Paso Robles, California

Yelena Yemchuk, Odesa, GOST Books, London

Previous Next

Jim Goldberg and Iryna Tsilyk
Another Life
STANLEY/BARKER, London

Katya Lesiv
I Love You
IST Publishing, Kyiv

Émeric Lhuisset 
Ukraine — Hundred Hidden Faces
Paradox, Edam, Netherlands, and André Frère Éditions, Marseille, France

Katerina Motylova
Loss
Self-published, Kyiv

Mark Neville
Stop Tanks with Books
Nazraeli Press, Paso Robles, California

Yelena Yemchuk
Odesa
GOST Books, London

The 2022 PhotoBook Award winners will be announced during Paris Photo on Friday, November 11, 2022.

Dr. Kenneth Montague Joins Aperture Board of Trustees

Aperture announces the appointment of Dr. Kenneth Montague to its board of trustees, effective September 15, 2022, joining the range of community advocates, philanthropists, business leaders, educators, artists, and collectors that lead and support the esteemed photography nonprofit.

“Ken is an incredibly committed advocate for artists and underrepresented voices, who brings with him extensive leadership experience in the arts, nonprofit institutions, medicine, and business,” said Cathy M. Kaplan, Chair of Aperture’s board. “We are thrilled to welcome him to Aperture’s leadership as we celebrate our 70th anniversary this year and look ahead to the opening of our new permanent home in summer 2024.”

An avid art collector, community leader, nonprofit founder, and advocate for African and Diasporic artists, Dr. Montague comes to Aperture with a breadth of expertise in championing underrecognized achievements and a long-standing commitment to the medium of photography. Montague started the Wedge Collection in 1997 to acquire and exhibit art that explores Black identity and subsequently founded Wedge Curatorial Projects, a nonprofit arts organization that helps to support emerging Black artists. The organization mounts exhibitions and lectures that explore Diasporic narratives, identity, and issues of representation.

Based in Toronto, Montague is a successful business leader who founded the group practice Word of Mouth Dentistry. He has served on the boards and acquisition committees of major institutions internationally, including the Art Gallery of Ontario’s board of trustees since 2015, and as a member of the African acquisitions committee at Tate Modern, London. He is also an advisor to the Department of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Dr. Montague’s book, As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021), serves as a testament to the support provided to artists by collecting and amplifying their work. As Teju Cole writes in “Letter to a Friend,” Montague “hews closely to his father’s mantra, ‘lifting as we rise,’ in his collecting, elevating the experiences of Black lives, the artists who capture them and, in turn, viewers who identify with them. As a result of this dynamic, Montague’s collection of photographs—made through the lens of the African and African diasporic experience—is a rare, insightful, radical, and bold act of deliverance.”

Dr. Montague joins Aperture’s existing board members with a shared dedication to the medium of photography: Peter Barbur, Julie Bédard, Dawoud Bey, Kwame Samori Brathwaite, Allan Chapin, Stuart B. Cooper, Kate Cordsen, Elaine Goldman, Lyle Ashton Harris, Michael Hoeh, Julia Joern, Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Cathy M. Kaplan, Philippe E. Laumont, Andrew E. Lewin, Lindsay McCrum, Joel Meyerowitz, Vasant Nayak, Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas, Helen Nitkin, Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Lisa Rosenblum, Thomas R. Schiff, Colette Veasey-Cullors, Casey Taylor Weyand, and Deborah Willis.