Aperture's Blog, page 8

15 Inspiring Photobooks by Women Photographers

Tina Barney, Family Commission with Snake, 2007
Courtesy the artist

Tina Barney: Family Ties (2024)

In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class to which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to her large-format photographs.

In 2024, Aperture published Family Ties, which collects sixty large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney’s career. These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie—a landscape of hidden tension found in microexpressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.

Myriam Boulos, Untitled, 2017–20
Courtesy the artist

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours (2023)

In her searing, diaristic account of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together more than a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity through to the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020.

Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay. “They know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours.

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Los Angeles, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Kelli Connell, Doorway II, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson worked with Weston as his partner and model, collaborating on some of his most iconic images.

Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locations in the western United States where the earlier couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. In chasing Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, finding a new kinship with the collaborative duo as she navigates a cultural landscape that has changed, yet remains mired in the same mythologies about nature, the artist, desire, and inspiration. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.

Collect a limited-edition print from Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis.

An-My Lê, Rescue, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars
Courtesy the artist

An-My Lê: Small Wars (2025)

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and evacuated with her family from Vietnam to the United States in 1975. With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work.

First published by Aperture in 2005 and now reissued on its twentieth anniversary, Small Wars brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, where Lê reconciles the memories of her childhood with the contemporary landscape; Small Wars, which explores a community of Vietnam War reenactors; and 29 Palms, which documents marines training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan—alongside a new afterward by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate two decades later.

Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. “What are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture? How does it become enmeshed with romance and myth over time?” Lê asks in an interview from the book with Hilton Als. “My concern is to make photographs that are provocative in response to the reality of war while challenging its context.”

Narahashi Asako, Kawaguchiko, 2003, from the series half awake and half asleep in the water
Courtesy the artist

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (2024)

I’m So Happy You Are Here is a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society.

The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades. Alongside the more than five-hundred images in the book is an illustrated bibliography and a selection of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians—many of which have been translated in English for the first time. While I’m So Happy You Are Here does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, the book offers a deep dive into the significant contributions of women to the history of Japanese photography.

Collect a range of prints from artists featured in I’m So Happy You Are Here.

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Pao Houa Her, Three bachelors at the Elder Center, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions (2024)

Pao Houa Her’s first monograph presents a deeply personal exploration of the fundamental concepts of home and belonging. A recipient of the 2023–24 Next Step Award, Her creates compelling and personal narratives grounded in the traditions and contemporary metaphors of the Hmong diasporic community. Throughout her images, the artist draws from myriad sources: apocryphal family lore, portraits of herself and her community, and reimagined landscapes in Minnesota and Northern California that stand in for Laos.

My grandfather turned into a tiger brings together four of the artist’s major series, reflecting her keen perspective on the boundary between authenticity and imitation. As Her has stated, photography is “a truth if you want it to be a truth.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions.

Justine Kurland, One Red, One Blue, 2000
Courtesy the artist

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her idyllic images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Made between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.

Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce. They hunt and explore, braid one another’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes. Kurland imagines a world at once lawless and utopian—an Eden in the wild. “I wanted to make the communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls,” writes Kurland. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures.

Sally Mann, from the series At Twelve, 1983–85
© Sally Mann 2024

Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women (2025)

First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve is an intimate yet unflinching portrayal of the interior complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann creates a collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, from the trying times of that age to its excitement and social possibilities.

This long sought-after reissue by one of photography’s most renowned artists retains the spirit of the original, highlighting both Mann’s large-format photographs alongside a series of her writings. As Ann Beattie wrote in 1988 for the book’s introduction: “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” Mann’s portraits do not shy away from the real consequences of this misunderstanding, documenting experiences of destitution, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy, and the girls in her photographs return the viewer’s gaze with equanimity.

Susan Meiselas, Sandinistas at the walls of the Estelí National Guard headquarters, 1978–79
Courtesy the artist

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua (2025)

Susan Meiselas first traveled to Nicaragua in June 1978. Three years prior, she had joined Magnum Photos, and this trip marked her first experience working in conflict photography. She went on to spend just over a year in Nicaragua, documenting an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize and extend her photographs, using QR codes in this new edition to link to excerpts from films by the artist. “I’m asking the reader to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book,” says Meiselas in an interview from the volume with Kristen Lubben, “but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”

Diana Markosian, Morning with You, from the book Father (Aperture, 2024)
Courtesy the artist

Diana Markosian: Father (2024)

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera, Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father.

The volume is a follow-up to her first book, Santa Barbara (2020), in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. In Father, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?”

Collect a limited-edition, signed print-and-book set of Diana Markosian: Father.

Kristine Potter, Dark Water, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (2023)

Kristine Potter’s dark and brooding photographs reflect on the Southern Gothic landscape of the American South as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the American murder ballad (which has developed a cult appeal and continues to be rerecorded today), the riverscape frequently doubles as a crime scene. Places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond are haunted by both the victor and the violence in the world Potter conjures.

The artist’s seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs—capturing the landscape and creating evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of these stories. The resulting volume, Dark Waters, reflects the casual popular glamorization of violence against women that remains prevalent in today’s cultural landscape. As Potter notes, “I see a through line of violent exhibitionism from those early murder ballads, to the Wild West shows, to the contemporary landscape of cinema and television. Culturally, we seem to require it.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Kristine Potter: Dark Waters.

Ming Smith, Dakar Roadside with Figures, Senegal, 1972
Courtesy the artist

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Collect the limited-edition print Dakar Roadside with Figures (1972) from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph.

Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke Feminist #4, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022)

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star, who was recently awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations.

In 2022, Aperture published Red Star’s first major monograph, Delegation, a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, which gleans from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. “I’m also marking on history,” says Red Star in an interview from the volume. “And red—I always think about school and failing papers and getting that red mark on your paper. I wanted that red mark on history.”

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror), 1990, from the Kitchen Table Series
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (2025)

Carrie Mae Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. Releasing this April alongside a related exhibition with Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, The Heart of the Matter is a comprehensive monograph that gathers together Weems’s landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82) to her most recent series on the Black church.

Throughout the book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the influential artist’s mind and eye. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems—as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys—at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

See here to browse the full collection of featured titles.

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Published on March 13, 2025 06:29

Kunié Sugiura’s Genre-Blending Vision

In the United States, photography has long struggled for the respect afforded to the more established mediums of painting and sculpture. From the 1930s onward, a prevailing consensus held that photography would only be seen as painting’s equal if its practitioners took advantage of the inherent qualities of the medium—what set it apart from other art forms—namely, its sharp focus and ability to render minute detail. Ansel Adams and his friends in Group f/64 deemed the popular style of Pictorialism, with its soft-focus attempts at mimicking the effects of painting, to be hackneyed and gimmicky and warned that photographic imitations of paintings would always be considered second-class.

There were notable exceptions, of course. Man Ray, for example, saw photography as one of many tools he might deploy to realize his creative vision and often made composite artworks. László Moholy-Nagy, coming from the radical Bauhaus in Germany, brought a similarly catholic approach to the Chicago Institute of Design, where he taught Harry Callahan. Kunié Sugiura’s practice, which melds photography and painting, emerged, in part, from this heritage. A student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 1963 to 1967, Sugiura studied under Kenneth Josephson and Frank Barsotti, who had been students of Callahan. But while her work bears hallmarks of Moholy-Nagy’s legacy, Sugiura’s approach to photography also reflects her fierce independence of mind and the influence of Japanese aesthetics.

Kunié Sugiura, Sea Shell 2, 1969. Photographic emulsion and graphite on canvas

Kunié Sugiura, 1972

When Sugiura first began creating pieces in the late 1960s that combined photography and painting, their hybridity made them difficult to categorize, effectively precluding her from market success at a time when US galleries, collectors, and photography-focused curators were less receptive to work that blurred the lines between mediums. From today’s perspective, however, her early defiance of traditional boundaries demonstrates her prescience as an artist. Her oeuvre is perhaps best understood in relation to the explosion of photography into the realm of contemporary painting in the 1960s that started with artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, who were early influences.

Sugiura moved to New York in 1967, mere days after graduating from the SAIC. Without access to a color darkroom, she was forced to pivot and find a new mode of producing photographs. Eventually, she began printing on canvas that she coated by hand with photo-emulsion, using a substance evocatively called Liquid Light. This was a radical departure from her previous efforts as it was a black-and-white process that required far less precision and fewer hours in the darkroom to get satisfying results. Sugiura rejected mainstream photographic trends in favor of trying something unique and unexpected.

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Mounting a 45-degree mirror to her enlarger, Sugiura projected her negatives onto treated canvas hung on the wall of her darkroom, washing the results in her bathroom. By using hand-coated canvases, she could create works of a scale nearly impossible at the time with commercially available photographic paper. Her first experiments were on the smaller side, but she eventually made examples that were as large as approximately six by eight feet. “I was really interested in Andy Warhol’s canvases,” she has stated. “So, I started making things I had taken nearby [the studio] and enlarged them. Then, I gradually made them bigger.”

It was a strenuously physical and messy business to wrangle thick sheets of wet fabric of such enormous dimensions by herself in the darkroom. She often wore a bathing suit while printing to avoid soaking her clothes. A portrait of the artist posing in front of her work in a 1972 exhibition gives a sense of the scale of one of these oversized pieces in proportion to her body.

Kunié Sugiura, Christie Street, 1976. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas

Kunié Sugiura, Sidewalk Palms, 1980. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood

The subjects of the largest in the Photocanvas (1968–72) series are mostly natural details: close-ups of sand, pebbles, an ivy-covered wall, the pattern of bark on a tree. Some are so closely cropped as to become almost abstract. As one reviewer wrote in 1972 of the experience of viewing these blown-up details, “The extreme change of scale is a visual shock. Thrown out of focus by the enlargement and simultaneously deprived of recognizability, the final image seems almost topographical.”

Even before she took up a brush, Sugiura was gesturing toward painting. At first glance, one might not recognize these works as photographs, especially because the artist enhanced many of the compositions with graphite and daubs of acrylic paint to accentuate certain details or increase the contrast, which was lost in the enlargement process. Printed on a rough canvas surface, they have a dreamlike quality and often dissolve at the edges, evoking a faded memory. In their drowsy softness, they are reminiscent of the Pictorialist compositions Ansel Adams and his “straight photography” contingent railed against. They are impressionistic, offering more feeling than detail.

Even before she took up a brush, Sugiura was gesturing toward painting.

Eventually, Sugiura would do more than just reference painting; she merged painted and photographic elements together into hybrid objects. It did not happen immediately, however. For a time in the early 1970s, she abandoned photography altogether. As Sugiura later recalled, “There was a period when I only did painting. But it turns out that painting is incredibly difficult. I struggled with it. That lasted for two or three years.” Serendipitously, she one day showed a friend some of her photographs printed on canvas next to paintings in the studio, and he remarked that they looked interesting together. Thus began her experiments with conjoining the two. The timing was fortuitous, as she was feeling stymied in her practice and in need of a breakthrough.

Kunié Sugiura, Oneway, 1979. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood Promontory (recto), 1980, Photographic emulsion, acrylic on canvas, wood, 78 × 62 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (198.1 × 158.8 × 6.4 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acquisitions Fund, 2024 (2024.92).

Promontory (recto), 1980, Photographic emulsion, acrylic on canvas, wood, 78 × 62 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (198.1 × 158.8 × 6.4 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acquisitions Fund, 2024 (2024.92).

Kunié Sugiura, Promontory, 1980. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood

The Photopainting (1975–81) series was influenced by the work of Warhol and Rauschenberg, who also printed photographs on canvas, but Sugiura was doing something markedly different. Warhol and Rauschenberg generally screen-printed images culled from the media, often of famous people or momentous current events. Sugiura, by contrast, took her own photographs and printed them on canvas in the darkroom, cropping, enlarging, or pairing details with painted components. In time, she also incorporated wooden elements, which frame the canvas parts and connect them to one another, giving the pieces a sculptural quality. Where Warhol and Rauschenberg were referring to popular culture and history, Sugiura was responding to the natural and urban worlds around her.

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While the subjects of the Photocanvas series are generally organic forms, many of the examples in the Photopainting series depict urban scenes, both in New York and in places she visited, notably Los Angeles. The painted portions of these composite pieces are simply executed, but the choice of their size and color in relation to the photographic elements is nuanced and visually sophisticated, resulting in unexpected and dynamic pairings. Sugiura does not shy away from beauty, but she also often revels in the grimy glory of New York, which has a visual appeal of its own, especially when lit up at night.

In the Photopainting series, Sugiura often deploys empty space to profound effect, as in her monumental Deadend Street (1978). The two photographs that comprise the work were made at the same location near the South Street Seaport in New York on different days: the one on the right after rain and the one on the left on a dry day. The surfaces of the painted panels directly correlate with the content of the photographs, the glossy surface on the right-hand panel evoking the rain-soaked pavement and the matte texture on the left suggesting dryness. The void at the center of the piece serves as a break, or a breath, connecting the two sides, a gap inspired by the Japanese concept of ma, which, in its simplest translation, refers to a pause in space and time.

Kunié Sugiura, Deadend Street, 1978. Photographic emulsion and acrylic on canvas, wood
All works courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Opposite: courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sugiura was hospitalized in 1990 with a collapsed lung and had numerous X-rays taken during the recovery process. At that time, X-rays were made on heavy-duty film, and Sugiura was excited by their mysterious beauty and the way they rendered the human body fragmented and foreign. She took her X-rays home and printed from them in her darkroom, later persuading her doctor to give her the discarded films of other patients and eventually accumulating a large collection. Over several years, Sugiura made various types of playful compositions using these found negatives. More than twenty years later, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sugiura revisited her X-ray negatives, combining them with painted canvases. Vertebra (2021), featured on the cover of Aperture’s Spring issue, is Sugiura’s first large-scale grid, a piece that can be configured in various ways. Here, the images of spinal columns become totemic, their repetition rhythmic.

From the time she first began printing on canvas in the late 1960s, Sugiura has willfully breached boundaries between mediums, making genre-defying artworks that, as she has said, “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.” And yet, despite the inherent rebelliousness of the act, the gesture does not overwhelm the vision. Rather, Sugiura fluidly and gracefully combines techniques to make dynamic and original hybrid forms where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This essay is adapted from the monograph Kunié Sugiura, forthcoming from MACK. An accompanying exhibition, Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting, will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, from April 26–September 14 2025.

See more in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting.”

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Published on March 13, 2025 06:27

How Can Image-Makers Open Up AI’s Mysterious “Black Box”?

Consider the below pair of images, both generated with the same prompt and the same basic generative AI model, Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), the state-of-the-art open-source image-generation model of mid-2024. The prompt: “a photograph of a mother and child on the back of a truck by Dorothea Lange.” Best known for her work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the rural poor during the Great Depression, Lange took many of the twentieth century’s most iconic photographs of destitution and perseverance, most famously Migrant Mother (1936). But the image on the left appears less like social documentary and more like a publicity still from a black-and-white Hollywood movie: airbrushed smooth skin, shiny white teeth peering out of a wide smile, and fresh, clean clothing. We can practically sense Clark Gable or Charlie Chaplin just out of frame. (For the moment, let’s ignore the telltale AI inconsistencies, most egregiously the woman’s misshapen hand, which mirrors that of the child, and the truck reduced to a doorframe.) Stylistically, this AI image bears no substantive resemblance to the work of Dorothea Lange.

Images generated with AI using the prompt “a photograph of a mother and child on the back of a truck by Dorothea Lange,” 2024

The image on the right, however, is a different beast. Fingers are still garbled. There are too many hands and not enough arms. Newer AI models have largely fixed anatomy problems, but they’ve exacerbated the stylistic issues that are the subject of this essay. Take the creations of DALL·E 3 (ChatGPT4o), Grok, and Flux, the leading AI image generators of now: The anatomy is nearly flawless, but the images hardly call to mind FSA photography, let alone the specific style of Lange.

Images generated with AI using the prompt “a photograph of a mother and child on the back of a truck by Dorothea Lange” (DALL·E 3, Grok, Flux1.1[Dev]), 2024

In the image on the right of the initial pair, although the anatomy is jumbled, the style feels like Lange’s to a degree that is wholly absent from the other images. As discussed in our article “Generative Style,” in the December 2024 issue of Aperture, we generated the image on the right by fine-tuning SDXL on a large corpus of Lange’s FSA photographs. The image of the left is blandly attractive and ready to be posted on a corporate Instagram account. The image on the right remains strikingly faithful to Lange’s photographic content and style, especially when we remember that it is nothing more than a data visualization. Visually, the difference between the two images is obvious. How do we account for that difference technically?

Latent Space

It is not possible to directly know how, where, or why each bit of meaning and data is stored in an AI model. The hidden layers that contain this information are known as the model’s latent space. This is the locus of the notorious “black box” of AI. When a prompt moves through an imaging model, the relevant data is retrieved from the latent space, transformed through various mathematical operations, and processed into a final visual form. The major generative AI models have purposely constructed their latent space to create blandly attractive images. The technical mechanism for this is called aesthetic scoring.

[image error]Images generated with AI using the prompt “a photograph of a schoolteacher with a student by Gordon Parks,” 2024

Aesthetic Scoring

Image generation, like all of AI, is a product. The companies behind the models have determined that their most viable output is an image that is fun, attractive, and likely to be shared on social media. To create the blandly attractive images most users like—or have been trained to like—AI models often rely on quantified and codified metrics of image qualities rated as desirable by the initial core user base, namely tech bros. Results that satisfy benchmarks for “beauty,” “composition”, and “coherence” are accentuated, and those which do not are suppressed. This automation has a homogenizing effect on many of the subjects of image generation. Broad white smiles, waxy smooth skin, piercing eyes, and soaring cheekbones are enforced across the board, even for destitute farmers. Our attempt to recreate the style of specific photographers—a pursuit we have termed latent specificity—requires the negation of aesthetic scoring and its homogenizing sheen.

Seeds and Seed-Locking

In order to study AI image generation, it is crucial to limit all settings available to us and test changes in a controlled manner. The most basic of these elements is that of the “seed.” The seed is nothing more than an arbitrary number that injects some randomness at the initial stage of image (and language) generation. If all other settings are held consistent but the seed is allowed to change, we will observe variation within a narrow range. For no reason other than randomness, some seeds produce better images than others—if the output is not quite satisfying, simply roll again.

Images generated with AI using the custom-trained model’s response to the prompt, “a photograph of a police officer by Gordon Parks,” 2024

Image generation is not a truly stochastic process. Midjourney, OpenAI, and Google do not expose the full suite of controls available to us with open-source solutions. If we lock our seed and all other settings, the AI will give us the exact same answer—in this case an image—again and again. This should disabuse us of any notions of a “ghost in the machine” or agency on the part of the model. Data in, data out.

How Photography Memorializes Dance

During a recent visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, I noticed a woman in the gift shop open the catalog for Edges of Ailey—an exhibition devoted to the dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey—and point proudly to a portrait of herself among the dancers. That made sense. Dance is ephemeral, experiential, but photographs are enduring. Without photography, how would dance be memorialized? Some might argue that video offers a closer impression of a performance, but permissions and quality can make reviewing archival events difficult. Image-making is memento mori embodied, which feels appropriate for an artist with a death-defying legacy. The curator Adrienne Edwards describes the exhibition as the culmination of years of research, an “interdisciplinary extravaganza,” within which photography plays a formative role. But what is the connection between Ailey’s distinct art and the ephemeral image?

John Lindquist, Carmen de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey at Jacobs Pillow, 1961
© Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

For Edges of Ailey, the museum’s fifth floor was transformed into a den of crimson and shadows: the walls were Lynchian red. Opaque, rouge curtains covered the windows and tinted the New Jersey skyline and Hudson River the color of blood. Set near the ceiling, a long video montage of performance clips ran the length of the gallery, while existing and newly commissioned artworks by Black artists both living and dead occupied the center of the floor. Upon entry, visitors were almost violently confronted with the thesis: “THIS IS DANCE. THIS IS ART. THIS IS ALVIN AILEY.” Yet, as the exhibition title suggests, we only get an outline.

Lyle Ashton Harris, <em>Billie #21</em>, 2002<br>© the artist”> </div> <div class=

Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #21, 2002
© the artist James Van Der Zee, <em>Dancer</em>, 1925<br>© Estate of James Van Der Zee”> </div> <div class=

James Van Der Zee, Dancer, 1925
© Estate of James Van Der Zee

Photography was positioned most prominently in the exhibition’s first section, which focuses on music and Ailey’s notion that dance is a conduit for sound, rather than response. This is illustrated effectively, if slightly predictably, by the selection of images. Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava bear the weight of such visualizations, by turns moody and romantic in their depictions of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and a couple lost in emotion in a string duet. Lyle Ashton Harris’s Billie #21 (2002), a self-portrait of the artist in costume as Billie Holiday, is the most recent work, but it makes an obvious connection, amplified by the other selected photographs. Works by James Van Der Zee, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and even Carrie Mae Weems, for example, seem like a greatest hits compilation dispatched to highlight Ailey’s connection to civil rights and labor movements, spirituality, and the history of enslavement in the United States.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies), 1989
© the artist and courtesy Autograph, London

Other sections of the show touch on Ailey’s collaborators and influences, but the aforementioned artists aren’t included. The works of the photographers (and most of the artists in the exhibition) connect to the themes in Ailey’s work, but not to Ailey himself. This does not detract from the beauty of the photographs, nor the sense that Ailey would commune deeply with them, but too frequently they are wielded as illustrations of concepts and fail to illustrate a specific relationship to Ailey as a person, as an artist, rather than the notion of his legacy.

Edges of Ailey exists in a climate of institutions playing catch-up—recognizing the contributions Black artists have made to their respective fields—to the point where I feel if you’ve seen one Van Der Zee you’ve seen them all, especially for visitors to any major New York survey in the last few years, such as The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Met, which seemed to have a Van Der Zee every two paces, or Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now at the Guggenheim, which positioned Fani-Kayode’s work in conversation with Robert Mapplethorpe’s.

Carl Van Vechten, Alvin Ailey, 1955
© Van Vechten Trust Carl Van Vechten, <em>Alvin Ailey</em>, 1955<br>© Van Vechten Trust”> </div> <div class=

Carl Van Vechten, Alvin Ailey, 1955
© Van Vechten Trust

On the literal edges of the exhibition were portraits of Ailey by Carl Van Vechten. These offer more direct evidence of Ailey’s relationship to photography, and to visual art in general. Van Vechten was a white writer known for inserting himself into the Harlem Renaissance via his controversial novel N***** Heaven (1926). He later pivoted to photography, and became famous for his portraits of prominent artists and intellectuals. The intimate images here hold many of the visual cues referenced in Ailey’s work, including early twentieth-century studio work (for instance, Van Der Zee’s The Actor) and iconography from African spiritual practices, rendered in lush, sensuous color akin that of Fani-Kayode.

Fred Fehl, Hidden Rites, 1973
© The Harry Ransom Center

Throughout the show, glimpses of Ailey appear in the form of ephemera, such as show documentation, or newly commissioned works by artists such as Jennifer Packer, but the portraits offer the most direct view. His expressions are coy, his gestures controlled. The backgrounds are rich in hue and pattern, with shadowy vignetting that holds much visual weight. There is something about this set of images that implies Ailey was aware of the power of being seen, especially by the white gaze. Perhaps he could intuit that, like his pieces, he could not be seen nor preserved in totality. But, like the woman in the lobby, he knew there was still something worth sharing, worth being proud of, something worth dancing for.

Edges of Ailey was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from September 25, 2024 through February 9, 2025.

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Published on February 28, 2025 06:57

Is the Age of Oversized Photobooks Over?

Walking through the New York Art Book Fair this past spring, I pointed out a few favorites to a friend, including Janelle Rebel’s Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings (The Everyday Press, 2024) and Bindi Vora’s Mountain of Salt (Perimeter Editions, 2023). My friend observed that I had a preference for smaller volumes. While Rebel’s book is 352 pages and printed on thin, lightweight paper reminiscent of photocopied research notes, Vora’s photobook tallies just under 450 pages. Mountain of Salt uses heavier paper stock but is airier, filled with white pages peppered with black-and-white found photographs printed at the scale of smartphone images and with large bold lines of text. Both are 7 1⁄2 inches tall by less than 6 inches wide, making them easy to flip through, slip in a tote bag, and skim on the subway ride home.

Small books are in. There is both an intimacy and an air of rebellion to small books (think diaries, underground zines, manifestos). Without a doubt, the content of a book determines its scale. “It’s mostly a gut feeling, whether I choose a smaller or larger size,” says Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, founder and primary designer of the Marseille-based publishing house Chose Commune. Jeux de mains (about 5 by 6 1⁄2 inches), a 2022 book filled with images of hands, is based on the size of Poimboeuf-Koizumi’s own hand.

Cover of Cookie Mueller, Garden of Ashes (Hanuman Editions, 2024)

Spread from Bindi Vora, Mountain of Salt (Perimeter Editions, 2023)

Or consider Hanuman Editions, the recent reboot of Hanuman Books, an imprint founded in the mid-1980s. All the books are 2 by 2 inches, with a simple cover design and gold lettering. Originally, the “playful kitsch” size referenced a book of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, but the books also fit in our back pockets, much like our smartphones.

Those dopamine dispensers have undoubtedly influenced the rising popularity of small books, especially photobooks. “Everything is filtered through our screen or phone,” says the book designer Brian Paul Lamotte. “We’ve kind of consciously become more and more comfortable with seeing imagery smaller. And we’re also reading things on our phones. So the jump to things being printed in that scale isn’t really so drastic.” Over the years, Lamotte has designed books at a range of scales, but recently, he’s been drawn to making and collecting smaller tomes.

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In 2021, Bruno Ceschel’s SPBH Editions launched its Essays series, designed by Lamotte. These slim white volumes are all the same size (about 4 by 6 inches) and have the same cover design of black sans serif type on a white backdrop. The series’ latest entry, Charlie Engman’s Hello Chaos, a Love Story, published in March 2024, revels in screen culture, deploying text-message bubbles and layered screenshots. Though small, this book is thick (182 pages) and feels similar to holding a phone—unlike one of the earliest titles in the series, Carmen Winant’s Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now (2021), which clocks in at 120 pages and is much smaller than many of her large-format photobooks. The size of the book matches the conversational tone of the text, an open-ended manifesto about how-to photography’s potential to deepen self-understanding.

“Carmen was commissioned based on a lecture,” Ceschel explains. “I suggested making it into a visual essay.” Lamotte’s design gives the book a literal weight but also suggests it can be read in one sitting.

Scale is more than height, width, and page count. When TBW Books founder and creative director Paul Schiek is designing a book, he thinks of “constant Venn diagrams in my head: What size, what color paper, what kind of printing, what price point do we want the book at?”

Cover of Carmen Winant, Instructional Photography (SPBH Editions, 2021)

Cover of Ryan Spencer: There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light (TBW Books, 2024)

Take Ryan Spencer’s There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light (2024), which sequences rephotographed neo-noir film stills into visuals for an unrealized movie to accompany the Afghan Whigs’ 1996 album Black Love. Reflecting this intricate premise, the photobook is modeled after a pulp paperback in scale (4 1/4 by 7 inches) and design, with a limited color palette of black-and-white images and red-tinted page edges. But the photographs would lose registration on cheap paper, so Schiek asked, “What if we use a paper that’s referencing pulp paper, but it’s semi-coated to accept photographs?” The final result looks much lighter than it is, lending a surprising weight to the dramatically lit photographs.

There Is No Light is not the first photobook modeled after a cheap paperback: In 1955, Roy DeCarava published a series of photographs of Harlem alongside fictional text by Langston Hughes in a small softcover titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life (recently reissued by David Zwirner Books). The book was a massive commercial success and remains one of the greatest photobooks of the twentieth century —but DeCarava was shocked at the small scale at which Simon and Schuster had reproduced his images. “I knew that it was not supposed to be as large as the usual book of photographs,” he once said in an interview, “but somehow I still expected a big, glossy book, with my photographs lavishly laid out.”

Cover and spread from Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Stephen Ellcock, Jeux de mains (Chose Commune, 2022)

“Small books might be cheaper to produce than larger ones, but artistically, they can be much more demanding to make, and to make sense of,” says the photography historian David Campany. “Every image and every design decision counts. But when a small book works, it really works, with an economy of means that can be profoundly rewarding.” Some examples of those that “work,” in Campany’s estimation, include Jacqueline Hassink’s The Table of Power (1996), whose diminutive form contrasts with the enormity of its subject matter (the boardrooms of some of the largest corporations in the world); Gallimard’s “tiny and perfect” 1931 monograph for the pathbreaking modernist photographer Germaine Krull; and “the best-selling photobook of all time,” the passport-size Point It: Traveller’s Language Kit (1992) by Dieter Graf.

The modern coffee-table book originated in the 1950s. “Coffee-table books had come to mean large, handsomely bound art books, picture collections, and various kind of picture-text combinations that were intended to be evidence of culture when displayed on living room coffee tables,” John William Tebbel wrote in A History of Book Publishing in the United States (1972). “Where once they had been read, they were now considered to be only display pieces.” But if the coffee-table book hastened the commercialization of photobooks—once popular vehicles for social commentary—it also offered a more accessible way for people to bring art into their homes.

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While coffee-table books have a place in mind, small photobooks are often designed toward a specific reading experience. “I think small books feel more digestible,” says Ben Denzer, a book artist and designer who has made many books of unusual sizes and shapes (including a roll of toilet paper and ketchup packets). “Maybe they also feel more useful. I’m thinking about guidebooks and other small books you bring with you to places,” he notes. Denzer points to the influence and ingenuity of the Dutch designer Irma Boom, without mention of whom any piece on small books would be remiss. “I read Boom’s mini Biography in Books (2010) all at once in Madison Square Park on a sunny day,” Denzer recalls. “My eyes hurt for a while after.” Boom’s book (1 1⁄2 by 2 inches) documents her expansive career in almost a thousand tiny pages, giving it an almost comical thickness.

Cover of Carla Williams, Tender (TBW, 2023)

With a sturdy softcover, Carla Williams’s Tender (TBW, 2023), a slim book smaller than the laptop with which I currently write, is filled with mostly black-and-white images, printed on heavy matte paper, of the artist’s own nude body. When I received the book in the mail, I was surprised by its satisfying heft.

“I remember very clearly her saying, ‘I would love it if it was something that lived next to the bed,’” Schiek, who designed and published the book, recalls Williams telling him.

Shala Miller’s Tender Noted (Wendy’s Subway, 2022), another book about the body, combines photographs, film stills, and short poetic texts in a softcover with a tipped-in image. “I referenced the size of an average journal notebook to capture that intimacy,” explains Kyla Arsadjaja, the book’s designer. Arsadjaja also designed another book for Wendy’s Subway, Na Mira’s The Book of Na (2022), an even smaller little red book replete with grainy black-and-white abstract photographs, typewritten entries, and scarlet page edges.

“Scale and the form are decisions that a reader can feel before they even open the book,” notes Denzer. In many cases, it is the scale of small photobooks that encourages readers to open them. Their private feeling is much of the appeal. And in the age of smartphones, where the power of an image is not determined by size, more and more publishers are welcoming this opportunity to make photobooks meant to be held and, most important, read.

This interview originally appeared in Aperture no. 257, “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI,” in The PhotoBook Review.

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Published on February 28, 2025 06:55

A Queer Wish for Other Worlds

The light hits differently in Los Angeles. They say it’s an effect of smog, as sunbeams refract through toxic gases and radiate lurid colors. Whatever the case, that light has brought countless artists to the Golden State. It cuts across many of David Gilbert’s photographs, captured as it glances through the window blinds of his LA home and studio. Sunset is a favored time for the way it paints things with a warming glow, like the cartoonishly bright, yellow paper stars in Solar System (2022) or the violet window pane in the aptly named Drama at Sunset (2013)—a moment of magic before the world goes dark.

David Gilbert, Drama at Sunset (Summer), 2013

David Gilbert, Solar System, 2023

Photographs are comprised of three essential elements—light, fixative, and ground, usually paper—which freeze-frame the ever-changing world in simplest matter. Since Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), the medium has been understood as an index of loss. The simple stuff that Gilbert photographs isn’t meant to last: drawings and collages on paper that are usually destroyed by the time their image circulates. Instead, they’re preserved in the paper stock of his photographic prints. In Gilbert’s studio, the lens always comes last, even though it’s the first thing we see. “The camera is the glue that holds things in place,” he says. This recursive tendency is part of what makes his photographs more than they seem.

David Gilbert, Hereafter, 2022

David Gilbert, Window Frame, 2023

Fox Talbot’s first photograph was of the slanting light through the window at Lacock Abbey, transferred from paper negative to salted paper. Conforming to the pictorial standards of his time, he composed his images like Dutch genre paintings. There’s a similarly Vermeer-like quality to Gilbert’s window photographs, several of which appeared in Flutter, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, which was presented last year at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem. The checkered wallpaper in Hereafter (2021) recalls the floor patterns in old master scenes of domestic life, while the play of natural light and shadow endows the photograph with its alluring sense of depth. The light is much flatter in Stencil (2021), but in this respect it mimics the titular paper cut-out at the picture’s center, and the way that photographs themselves are produced from negative images. The chiaroscuro in Window Frame (2023) is so intense that it’s difficult to tell negative from positive, solid from air.

Installation views of Flutter at the North Carolina Museum of Art, 2024
Courtesy the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem

In contrast, other photographers have used paper to render architectural features as simulacra. The meticulously constructed paper sets of Thomas Demand, with their flat, matte surfaces, mimic the photo paper upon which their images are printed. Casting no shadows, they appear unnervingly real. James Casebere’s paper architectural models are dramatically illuminated with studio lights, but are likewise too perfect to be entirely convincing. Such analog art, situated in an uncanny valley, seems to predict the advent of AI-generated imagery. And then there’s Gilbert’s Night, Night (2015), with its crudely-painted cardboard building model sitting before a set of clashing curtains decorated with butterflies and stars. Such assemblages, by contrast, are full of jagged cuts, curls, and other hand-hewn imperfections, which lend them an almost comical pathos. Gilbert’s work wears its heart on its sleeve.

David Gilbert, Cloud Clutter, 2020

Its decorative elements are the marks of a tender obsession. The unapologetically kitschy Cloud Clutter (2018), with its tableau of fake birds and flowers, colorful mugs and tins, straws, feathers, marbles, and a wide variety of store-bought art supplies, could be a queer bedroom collection or the aftermath of a crafting party. Several of his photographs depict sets with painted or patterned backdrops and bright footlights—Constellations (2020), Full House (2019), and Center Stage (2019)—like living room theaters where the performers have just left the stage. They recall Jack Smith, who used mass-produced materials to transform his East Village apartment into a queer fantasyland for renegade films and performances, or James Bidgood, whose long-lost cinematic masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971), remastered this year by the Museum of Modern Art, made horny harems, docks, and country idylls from cut-up prom dresses, tinsel, and beads.

David Gilbert, Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013

David Gilbert, Grand Dame, 2019

In Smithian spirit, Gilbert scatters camp, erotic Easter Eggs throughout his pictures, like painted penises both big (Pink Thing, 2019) and small (Small Erotic Picture (Spring), 2013). Gone Girl and Grande Dame (2019) could be portraits of Harlem Renaissance queens by Carl van Vechten, but with no bodies, just drag. As critic Matthew Schneier observed in the catalog for Heaven and Earth, Gilbert’s 2023 exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, “Gilbert is a consummate squirreler of set pieces, and the studio is a stage.”

Nick Mauss echoes this notion in Body Language (2023), his recent study of the photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa co-authored by Angela Miller. “The early twentieth century artist’s studio was a site for the creation of queer ‘counterpublics,’” he notes—a place for collaborative performances, discussions, and intimate exchanges of albums and other ephemera. The gently curling paper cutouts, tinsel garlands and fake flowers in Gilbert’s photographs recall the cellophaned interior of artist Florine Stettheimer’s Manhattan salon, or the studio sets built by Platt Lynes and van Vechten, where both men photographed countless models, lovers, and friends. “A resistance to the effects of market-based public circulation led these artists to specify the terms of their work’s access to a limited ‘inner’ public, not unrelated to the gesture of sharing the contents of their scrapbooks,” Mauss writes. This may be why Gilbert’s work feels so intensely private, like a scrapbook for a tightly knit circle of friends. Its cut, torn, and folded surfaces carry a queer wish for other worlds—or utopias—to emerge from the waste-paper of this one.

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That wish takes full form in Castle (2024), a tracing-paper schloss which Gilbert photographed in beguiling shadow and printed at larger-than-life scale, enhancing its architectural illusionism. But unlike the artificial light in photographs by those architectural illusionists, Demand and Casebere, the slanting glow imprinted on Gilbert’s works is almost always natural, illuminating traces of the artist’s hand that seem just as evanescent. As that light changes and fades, so too will these constructions be dismantled and repurposed to make something new. They bear an entwined melancholy and hopefulness often shared by works that can be characterized as “queer,” in the sense that theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz used it to signify “a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something which has either recently gone or “is not yet here.” These photographs aren’t indexes—they’re dreams.

David Gilbert, Castle, 2024

David Gilbert, Stencil, 2023
Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

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Published on February 28, 2025 06:50

How Susan Meiselas Documented Nicaragua’s Revolution

Susan Meiselas first traveled to Nicaragua in June 1978. Three years prior, Meiselas had joined Magnum Photos, and this trip marked her first experience working in conflict photography. Meiselas went on to spend just over a year in Nicaragua, documenting an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from films by the artist, including Pictures from a Revolution (1991, codirected with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti) in which Meiselas tracks down and interviews the people she photographed, and Reframing History (2004, codirected with Alfred Guzzetti), which highlights her collaborations with local communities installing mural-sized images in the places where they were originally taken, eliciting the memories and reflections of those passing by.

By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.” In an interview from the book, Meiselas speaks with Magnum Foundation’s director, Kristen Lubben, on how the work of this evolving project has been circulated, revisited, and repatriated—and how and why it endures.

NICARAGUA. Matagalpa. 1978. Muchachos await counterattack by the Guard. <br /><br />Contact email:<br />New York : photography@magnumphotos.com<br />Paris : magnum@magnumphotos.fr<br />London : magnum@magnumphotos.co.uk<br />Tokyo : tokyo@magnumphotos.co.jp<br /><br />Contact phones:<br />New York : +1 212 929 6000<br />Paris: + 33 1 53 42 50 00<br />London: + 44 20 7490 1771<br />Tokyo: + 81 3 3219 0771<br /><br />Image URL:<br />http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=Mod_ViewBoxInsertion.ViewBoxInsertion_VPage&R=2K7O3RWHOFI&RP=Mod_ViewBox.ViewBoxZoom_VPage&CT=Image&SP=Image&IT=ImageZoom01&DTTM=Image&SAKL=T

Susan Meiselas, Awaiting counter attack by the Guard in Matagalpa, 1978–79 NICARAGUA. Managua. Car of a Somoza informer burning in Managua. (NICARAGUA, page 17) ©Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

NICARAGUA. Managua. Car of a Somoza informer burning in Managua. (NICARAGUA, page 17) ©Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Car of a Somoza informer burning in Managua, 1978–79

Kristen Lubben: Before going to Nicaragua in 1978 you had never photographed conflict nor had you worked for the media. You were coming from what seems like a totally different universe than that of a war photographer: You were working on Prince Street Girls, portraits of adolescent girls in your Little Italy neighborhood, and two years earlier you had published Carnival Strippers, an extended photo-essay on women in traveling strip shows in New England, now a photo classic.

Susan Meiselas: Yes, Nicaragua was a quantum leap for me. Not only was the subject matter of Carnival Strippers and Prince Street Girls different than what I would encounter in Nicaragua, but I was also used to working in a different way—having extended relationships with subjects, and bringing back contact sheets for them to respond to. Carnival Strippers was the work I submitted to join Magnum, the photographer’s collective.

Magnum Photos press ID, 1978

Lubben: And did joining Magnum lead you to go to Nicaragua?

Meiselas: At Magnum there was a culture that supported taking initiative—going to a place not knowing more than whatever you could scrape together from afar. Remember, we are in a transformed world of information now; you can sit at home and do research online and feel you know a place without ever going there. But I had no idea what Nicaragua even looked like. I was reading snippets, these little stories that were ten lines long, and I wasn’t seeing any photographs with them. That made me think, “Maybe I should go—but how do you do that?”

The tipping point was a full-page New York Times article in January of 1978 about the assassination of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the editor of the newspaper La Prensa and the country’s most outspoken opposition figure. Maybe it was the size of that article; maybe it was the way in which it implicated America in supporting the Somoza family. It all just started to turn in my head.

Through Gilles Peress at Magnum I met Peter Pringle, a British journalist working for the London Times. He had just been to Nicaragua, writing about the history of the English on the Atlantic coast, but hadn’t touched on what was happening with the brewing revolution, and was curious to do that. So I said, “Great.” I just assumed that’s what you do: find a writer you want to work with, and you go and do it. Then between February and when I ultimately left in June, there were more stories about Nicaragua—strikes and student protests, small events that kept percolating through the news. Peter, meanwhile, got bogged down and kept delaying the trip. One day I was at Magnum and [photographer] Richard Kalvar said, “I thought you were going to Nicaragua.” And I said, “Well, Peter can’t go . . . ” He said, “What do you need him for? You’re going to take the pictures.” It was kind of like, “Wow. Okay. That’s another idea.” That nudge helped me make the leap.

And I went. With no concrete plan in place. I didn’t speak Spanish. I didn’t even know where I would stay. It sounds nuts, but it’s true.

NICARAGUA. Managua. 1979. Street fighter. <br /><br />Contact email:<br />New York : photography@magnumphotos.com<br />Paris : magnum@magnumphotos.fr<br />London : magnum@magnumphotos.co.uk<br />Tokyo : tokyo@magnumphotos.co.jp<br /><br />Contact phones:<br />New York : +1 212 929 6000<br />Paris: + 33 1 53 42 50 00<br />London: + 44 20 7490 1771<br />Tokyo: + 81 3 3219 0771<br /><br />Image URL:<br />http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=Mod_ViewBoxInsertion.ViewBoxInsertion_VPage&R=2K7O3RWH075&RP=Mod_ViewBox.ViewBoxZoom_VPage&CT=Image&SP=Image&IT=ImageZoom01&DTTM=Image&SAKL=T

Susan Meiselas, Street fighter in Managua, 1978–79

Susan Meiselas, Student demonstration broken up by the National Guard using tear gas, Managua, 1978–79

Lubben: So how did you get started? Did you just walk around Managua, taking pictures?

Meiselas: Yes, walking around, really feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing. But the first day, I went to La Prensa and I met with Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the son of the man who had been killed, and Margarita Montealegre, who was a young photographer at the newspaper. I was lucky that they both spoke English.

Lubben: Were there any other foreign photographers there?

Meiselas: There was one other, a Colombian photographer who came for a protest march, around the time Los Doce (The Twelve) returned to Nicaragua. Los Doce was an alliance of middle-class businessmen, lawyers, and professionals who aligned themselves with the Sandinistas against Somoza. They were kind of a legal front. The Sandinistas were underground. During that first trip I met many people who were sympathetic to the Sandinistas, but I didn’t meet anybody inside the organization. Or, if I did, I didn’t know that they were.

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua 50.00 Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua is a contemporary classic—a seminal contribution to the literature of concerned photography.

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Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua

Photographs by Susan Meiselas. Text by Kristen Lubben.

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Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua is a contemporary classic—a seminal contribution to the literature of concerned photography.

Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil. Starting with a powerful and chilling evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, the images trace the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The book includes interviews with various participants in the revolution, along with letters, poems, and statistics.

In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. Multiple editions build upon this body of work to evoke and conjure up the reality of people’s lives and aspirations, their victories and disappointments. In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from the films Pictures from a Revolution (1991, codirected with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti) in which Meiselas tracks down and interviews the people she photographed, and Reframing History (2004, codirected with Alfred Guzzetti), her collaboration with local communities in installing mural-sized images in the places where they were originally taken, eliciting the memories and reflections of those passing by. By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.” An interview with the artist by Magnum Foundation’s director, Kristen Lubben, addresses how the work of this evolving project has been circulated, revisited, and repatriated—and how and why it endures.

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 128
Number of images: 75
Publication date: 2025-03-11
Measurements: 10.8 x 8.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115902

Contributors

Susan Meiselas (born in Baltimore, 1948) is a documentary photographer based in New York. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. Her first book, Carnival Strippers, was published in 1976. That year, Meiselas joined Magnum Photos, where she remains a member, and since 2007 has served as president of the Magnum Foundation. Her numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, and the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and Rencontres d’Arles.
Kristen Lubben is a curator, writer, editor, and executive director of the Magnum Foundation.

12 Photobooks That Celebrate Black Voices and History

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, by Maurice Berger (2024)

In Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, the late cultural historian Maurice Berger explores the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Between 2012 and 2019, Berger first shared these essays in a monthly column on the New York Times Lens blog. Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times, this volume marks the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series, created and coedited by Drs. Sarah E. Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

Edited by Marvin Heiferman, this anthology brings together seventy-one essays that examine the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race, and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. From pivotal moments in American history to the ways in which images by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gordon Parks, Jamel Shabazz, Pete Souza help us see the world anew, Race Stories showcases Berger’s lifelong endeavor to distill complex ideas about racial equity. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in the book’s foreword: “This collection establishes not only Maurice Berger’s place in the history of the criticism of photography but also his role as a social philosopher determined to underscore, essay by essay, all that unites us as human beings.”

Dawoud Bey, Irrigation Ditch, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023)

In Elegy, Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, this volume marks a continuation of Bey’s ongoing work exploring African American history. Copublished by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Elegy focuses on three of Bey’s landscape series—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—shedding a light on the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the US.

Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey not only evokes history but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. “This is ancestor work,” Bey tells the New York Times. “Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Austin, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in the The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Kwame Brathwaite, Model wearing a natural hairstyle, AJASS, Harlem, ca. 1970
Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019)

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color.

Brathwaite, who passed away in 2023, was born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance. Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling troupe for Black women. Working with these two organizations, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the Black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph of his work, showcasing Brathwaite’s riveting message about Black culture and freedom. “To ‘Think Black’ meant not only being politically conscious and concerned with issues facing the Black community,” writes Tanisha C. Ford, “but also reflecting that awareness of self through dress and self-presentation. . . . [They] were the woke set of their generation.”

Ernest Cole, Untitled, New York City, 1968–71
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole: The True America (2024)

After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book House of Bondage in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed the city’s streets extensively, chronicling daily life in Harlem and around Manhattan. In 1968 he traveled across the country to cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, as well as to rural areas of the South, capturing the activism and emotional tenor in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s sharp eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.

Cole released very few images from this body of work while he was alive. Thought to be lost entirely, the negatives of Cole’s American pictures resurfaced in Sweden in 2017 and were returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. The True America marks the first time these photographs have been brought together in a major publication. This trove of rediscovered work acts as a vital window into American society and redefines the scope of Cole’s photographic work.

Collect a limited-edition print from Ernest Cole: The True America. An exhibition of The True America is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through June 22, 2025.

Awol Erizku, Love Is Bond (Young Queens), 2018–20
Courtesy the artist

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax (2023)

Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. The 2023 volume Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to trace the artist’s career. Spanning over ten years, the monograph blends together his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer, including his conceptual portraits of cultural icons such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan.

Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black people in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “I always think about my work as a constellation, and a new piece is just another star within the universe,” he asserts in his wide-ranging conversation with the curator Antwaun Sargent, included in the book. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination. When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.”

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James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London, 1966
Courtesy the artist

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2021)

In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Montague founded the Wedge Collection in Toronto in an effort to acquire and exhibit work by artists of African descent. As We Rise features over one hundred works from the collection, bringing together artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa in a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Jamel Shabazz’s definitive street portraits to Lebohang Kganye’s blurring of self, mother, and family history in South Africa, As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, “Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration—no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood—but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.”

Collect a special vinyl LP, As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic , featuring a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the diaspora.

Deana Lawson, Oath, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Published in 2018, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph was the first book by the acclaimed artist. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Most recently, Lawson was the guest editor of Aperture’s Fall 2024 issue, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” in which she curated a selection of artists past and present to explore the enigmatic nature of photography.

One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in an essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print.

Zanele Muholi, Mihla IV, Port Edward, South Africa, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024)

The South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTQIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024) is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

In their evocative self-portraits, Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness, and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states in an interview from the 2018 volume. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Drop Scene (_1030683), 2018
Courtesy the artist

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z (2024)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to his studio practice and portraiture. Through collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, Sepuya encourages multivalent narrative readings of each image.

Four years after publishing the first widely available volume of Sepuya’s work, Aperture released Dark Room A–Z, a comprehensive monograph that dives into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that he has interwoven throughout the images. The volume unpacks Sepuya’s Dark Room series (2016–21), reflecting on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind this expansive body of work. Alongside Sepuya’s work is a range of writings by critics, curators, friends, and the artist. Dark Room A–Z serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuya’s image-making, after nearly two decades of practice.

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Shikeith, O’ my body, make of me always a man who questions!, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (2022)

A visceral and haunting exploration of Black male vulnerability, joy, and spirituality, Notes towards Becoming a Spill is the first monograph by the acclaimed multimedia artist Shikeith. Following the lyrical artistic expressions of contemporary portraitists such as Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mickalene Thomas, Shikeith photographs men as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.

In work he describes as “leaning into the uncanny,” the faces and bodies of Shikeith’s collaborators glisten with sweat (and tears) in a manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what the critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” Notes towards Becoming a Spill redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

Collect a limited-edition screenprint by Shikeith.

See here to browse the full collection of featured titles.

View more on Aperture's website »

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Published on February 14, 2025 13:00

11 Photobooks That Celebrate Black Voices and History

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, by Maurice Berger (2024)

In Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, the late cultural historian Maurice Berger explores the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Between 2012 and 2019, Berger first shared these essays in a monthly column on the New York Times Lens blog. Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times, this volume marks the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series, created and coedited by Drs. Sarah E. Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

Edited by Marvin Heiferman, this anthology brings together seventy-one essays that examine the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race, and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. From pivotal moments in American history to the ways in which images by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gordon Parks, Jamel Shabazz, Pete Souza help us see the world anew, Race Stories showcases Berger’s lifelong endeavor to distill complex ideas about racial equity. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in the book’s foreword: “This collection establishes not only Maurice Berger’s place in the history of the criticism of photography but also his role as a social philosopher determined to underscore, essay by essay, all that unites us as human beings.”

Dawoud Bey, Irrigation Ditch, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023)

In Elegy, Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, this volume marks a continuation of Bey’s ongoing work exploring African American history. Copublished by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Elegy focuses on three of Bey’s landscape series—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—shedding a light on the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the US.

Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey not only evokes history but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. “This is ancestor work,” Bey tells the New York Times. “Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Austin, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in the The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Ernest Cole: The True America (2024)

After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book House of Bondage in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed the city’s streets extensively, chronicling daily life in Harlem and around Manhattan. In 1968 he traveled across the country to cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, as well as to rural areas of the South, capturing the activism and emotional tenor in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s sharp eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.

Cole released very few images from this body of work while he was alive. Thought to be lost entirely, the negatives of Cole’s American pictures resurfaced in Sweden in 2017 and were returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. The True America marks the first time these photographs have been brought together in a major publication. This trove of rediscovered work acts as a vital window into American society and redefines the scope of Cole’s photographic work.

Collect a limited-edition print from Ernest Cole: The True America. An exhibition of The True America is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through June 22, 2025.

Awol Erizku, Love Is Bond (Young Queens), 2018–20
Courtesy the artist

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax (2023)

Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. The 2023 volume Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to trace the artist’s career. Spanning over ten years, the monograph blends together his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer, including his conceptual portraits of cultural icons such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan.

Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black people in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “I always think about my work as a constellation, and a new piece is just another star within the universe,” he asserts in his wide-ranging conversation with the curator Antwaun Sargent, included in the book. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination. When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.”

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James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London, 1966
Courtesy the artist

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2021)

In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Montague founded the Wedge Collection in Toronto in an effort to acquire and exhibit work by artists of African descent. As We Rise features over one hundred works from the collection, bringing together artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa in a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Jamel Shabazz’s definitive street portraits to Lebohang Kganye’s blurring of self, mother, and family history in South Africa, As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, “Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration—no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood—but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.”

Collect a special vinyl LP, As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic , featuring a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the diaspora.

Deana Lawson, Oath, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Published in 2018, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph was the first book by the acclaimed artist. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Most recently, Lawson was the guest editor of Aperture’s Fall 2024 issue, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” in which she curated a selection of artists past and present to explore the enigmatic nature of photography.

One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in an essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print.

Zanele Muholi, Mihla IV, Port Edward, South Africa, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024)

The South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTQIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024) is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

In their evocative self-portraits, Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness, and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states in an interview from the 2018 volume. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Drop Scene (_1030683), 2018
Courtesy the artist

Paul Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z (2024)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to his studio practice and portraiture. Through collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, Sepuya encourages multivalent narrative readings of each image.

Four years after publishing the first widely available volume of Sepuya’s work, Aperture released Dark Room A–Z, a comprehensive monograph that dives into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that he has interwoven throughout the images. The volume unpacks Sepuya’s Dark Room series (2016–21), reflecting on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind this expansive body of work. Alongside Sepuya’s work is a range of writings by critics, curators, friends, and the artist. Dark Room A–Z serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuya’s image-making, after nearly two decades of practice.

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Shikeith, O’ my body, make of me always a man who questions!, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (2022)

A visceral and haunting exploration of Black male vulnerability, joy, and spirituality, Notes towards Becoming a Spill is the first monograph by the acclaimed multimedia artist Shikeith. Following the lyrical artistic expressions of contemporary portraitists such as Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mickalene Thomas, Shikeith photographs men as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.

In work he describes as “leaning into the uncanny,” the faces and bodies of Shikeith’s collaborators glisten with sweat (and tears) in a manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what the critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” Notes towards Becoming a Spill redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

Collect a limited-edition screenprint by Shikeith.

See here to browse the full collection of featured titles.

View more on Aperture's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 14, 2025 13:00

Barbara Probst’s Points of View

Twenty-five years ago, the German-born photographer Barbara Probst ascended a Midtown Manhattan high-rise, arranged a dozen cameras on tripods, and, at 10:47 p.m., leaped across the rooftop as an assistant triggered the shutters via a radio-controlled release system. The resulting grid of black-and-white and color images, a cross between Henri Cartier-Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni, inaugurated the artist’s Exposures series (2000–ongoing), whose entries each consist of two or more photographs of the same scene, captured simultaneously at different perspectives and time-stamped with Teutonic precision, so that a single second shatters into a puzzle impossible to solve. The Exposures—which span landscapes, still lifes, fashion shoots, portraits, and street photography—may be read as philosophical treatises, each one coolly oppugning their medium’s purchase on the Truth. But they’re also beautiful, suffused with a surprising spontaneity and forensic mystery.

Below, the photographer discusses her work in the context of Barbara Probst: Subjective Evidence, a survey exhibition on view through February 9 at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, which opened last November as part of the city’s seventh FotoFocus Biennial, Backstories.

Installation view of Barbara Probst, Exposure #1 2000, 2002, at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 2024
Photograph by Jacob Drabik

Zack Hatfield: Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center is so perfect for your photographs. The building has a kind of baroque interplay of spatial compression and expansion that we find in your work too. What was it like making the exhibition here?

Barbara Probst: I came here a year ago with Kevin Moore, the curator of the exhibition, to look at the space. I immediately liked the architecture, because of all these different vantage points and the possibilities of creating relationships between the works in it. My assistant made a model of the space to see how the works can be placed in relation to each other. And it was a very difficult model to build. Hardly any ninety-degree angles.

Hatfield: You also make models for your actual photoshoots as well, right?

Probst: Yeah, or drawings. Sometimes I make clay figures of the people I’m photographing to better imagine how they relate to each other in the shoot and to figure out the angles and viewpoints of the cameras. Shooting with several cameras simultaneously is a complex procedure and needs to be prepared very well.

Barbara Probst, Exposure #185: Munich, Nederlingerstrasse 68, 04.21.23, 2:35 p.m., 2023

Hatfield: People associate your exposures with meticulous orchestration and preparation, but there’s also a lot of improvisation that goes into it.

Probst: Sometimes I feel like a film director with all the details of a scene and all the viewpoints of the cameras in my mind before the shoot. Only when a shoot is planned and set up very accurately can I allow chance and improvisation. And often these unforeseeable changes add something really interesting to the pictures that I couldn’t have envisioned beforehand.

Barbara Probst, Exposure #32: N.Y.C., 249 W. 34th Street, 01.02.05, 5:04 p.m., 2005

Hatfield: Is there an example of a work in this show that turned out differently than you originally envisioned it?

Probst: Most of them are close to my conception. You need to realize that I hardly ever look through one of the viewfinders during a shoot. Usually, I find a position hidden from the cameras, and from there I release the shutters simultaneously. That’s why my control is limited. Envisioning a shoot and the outcome of the images is one thing—the realities during a shoot, another. For example, Exposure #106 was a shoot on the street with several models inside a building linked to an unstaged scene with a yellow cab on the street downstairs. The shoot was made with twelve cameras. I conceived the twelve images very precisely beforehand, but there was much going on in the shoot that was beyond my control. But even in a shoot like this, I came very close to the images I had in my mind. The works made in the studio, like the close-ups and still lifes, are much more controllable and calculable. It’s a very different way of working for me.

Hatfield: How do you see your work’s relationship to narrative?

Probst: To look simultaneously from different perspectives means to give up the single point of view to which we’re accustomed. It also means no longer believing that the narrative emanating from that single viewpoint is reliable or truthful. I feel that my work actually has a lot to do with life. We all are here on this planet at the same time, and we all look at this world in very different ways. What I have learned from my work is that instead of choosing one way of seeing or another, it’s much more realistic to acknowledge many. In today’s world, this might sound disconcerting, but it can also be a relief to recognize that we don’t really know.

Barbara Probst, Exposure #180, Munich, Nederlingerstrasse 68, 09.11.22, 3:40 p.m., 2022

Barbara Probst, Exposure #87: N.Y.C., 401 Broadway, 03.15.11, 4:22 p.m., 2011

Hatfield: There’s a fascinating relationality that emerges through this distinct triangulation of photographer, model, and viewer. Your pictures ask a lot of the viewers’ imagination.

Probst: Yes, in some works, I try to draw the viewer into the images by creating this kind of triangulation. For example, in Exposure #87, there’s the space in which the model is located; there’s the space of the photographer in the backdrop on the wall of the studio, and there’s the “real” space of the viewer, all of which overlap and interact.

Hatfield: I’m interested in your beginnings as a sculptor. I know you were inspired early on by Rodin’s public statue The Burghers of Calais (1884–95), specifically how the figures are arranged nonhierarchically.

Probst: I chose a very classical training as a sculptor, which included daily nude modeling and drawing in the first year. Then I made abstract sculptures and later sculptures that included photography and finally installations containing sculptures and photographs before I dived deeply and exclusively into the medium of photography by starting the Exposure series in January 2000. I still feel that my work is very sculptural. Looking at something from different viewpoints is a sculptural interest. The Exposures can create a spatial impression in the mind of the viewer. The nudes, for example, are the works coming closest to this impression. I look at a nude from different angles, just like a sculptor while modeling one. These nude exposures are a nod to the classical genre of nudes, but they also break with it at the same time by reflecting the making of the pictures by showing all the cameras shooting the nude.

Barbara Probst, Exposure #152: N.Y.C., Broadway & Broome Street, 04.18.20, 10:46 a.m., 2020

Barbara Probst, Exposure #124, Brooklyn, Industria Studios, 39 South 5th St, 04.13.17, 10:39 a.m., 2017

Hatfield: The museum’s wall text draws a connection between the multiple perspectives at play in your work and this idea of empathy—of trying to share the experiences of other people. Yet I feel as though your work dramatizes the limitations of knowing other people. Is your work about trying to experience the world from other peoples’ viewpoints?

Probst: You said it beautifully: It dramatizes the limitation of knowing other people. The limitation of knowing how they see the world. Having said that, I’m also interested in empathy, which is about trying to inhabit other points of view. Which requires imagination.

Hatfield: You don’t call your photographs portraits, but close-ups.

Probst: There are works of mine that refer to the genre of portraiture, but they aren’t portraits, because my work is never about the people, their character, or their personality. It’s the relationship between them and the viewer I am interested in, the back and forth of gazes—the gaze of the protagonists at the viewer and vice versa. For example, in Exposure #124, two women look at two different cameras. When you stand in front of the images, the two viewpoints of the cameras merge into one in your eyes. The viewer’s otherwise all-so-certain point of view is in question here.

Hatfield: Throughout the show, it’s remarkable how the subtlest change to an angle can completely transform a composition and its emotional content.

Probst: Often a slight difference in viewpoint can make you see a completely different image, a completely different narrative. Like Exposure #48, the cameras weren’t far apart. But in one image, she seems to be very present and aware of being photographed, and in the other image, the mood is completely different. She looks dreamy and deep in thought.

Installation view of Barbara Probst: Subjective Evidence, at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 2024
Photograph by Jacob Drabik

Barbara Probst, Exposure #48: Munich, Minerviusstrasse 11, 01.06.07, 3:17 p.m., 2007
All photographs courtesy the artist

Hatfield: Has your understanding of your own work changed in the almost twenty-five years since you did the first Exposure? Social media has enabled this sort of global simultaneity to accelerate at an unprecedented scale, and the idea of photographic truth has been pretty thoroughly vitiated.

Probst: It certainly has changed over the years. I started out being very conceptual. My interest in the relationship between photography and reality compelled me to conceive Exposure #1 and many other series afterward. Twenty-five years ago, this was a subject less questioned. Today, photography still has a tremendous influence on our subconscious as well as our conscious mind. This issue is inherent to my work, but it moved into the background over the years. Other aspects within the principle of simultaneity emerged, and I immersed myself in different photographic genres. And in more recent years, there’s more playfulness, and often there are references to painting. The still lifes, for example.

Hatfield: You’ve mined this concept for so long without exhausting its potential. You’ve been able to breathe new life into it through what you describe as tropes or clichés.

Probst: Thankfully yes. Exposure #1 is the base of all these works. After I finished it, I knew that there was much more to explore. I do have challenging phases of reflection and research, but usually I emerge refreshed, with new ideas. I’m currently occupied with new work that explores a field I haven’t entered before. But since I’m still in the middle of making it, I don’t want to say too much.

Barbara Probst: Subjective Evidence is on view through February 9 at the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art.

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Published on February 07, 2025 12:06