Aperture

Several years ago, when Kristen Gresh, curator of photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, visited Graciela Iturbide at the photographer’s Mexico City studio, she was given carte blanche to look into her archives. Gresh and Iturbide went throu

In March 2018, in the popular tourist district of Kandy, Sri Lanka, a road-rage incident between a Buddhist man and a group of Muslim men unexpectedly escalated into days of mob violence. Religious extremist groups manipulated the incident and used i

It began with a landscape in the viewfinder. Ka-Man Tse was making a long exposure of a Hong Kong public square with her large-format camera when a teenage couple waltzed onto the scene. The image of the girls laughing and openly flirting imprinted o

Posing for a family picture is often our introduction to the act of being photographed. Whether we want to participate or not, a family member with a camera or a studio photographer with a backdrop guides us into the frame and produces a memory. The

Shortly after midnight on June 14, 2017, a devastating fire tore through the Grenfell Tower public housing high-rise in West London. Seventy-two residents of the twenty-four-story building were killed in what was the most lethal blaze in postwar Brit

In one image from Motoyuki Daifu’s series Project Family (2007–ongoing), the photographer’s mother eats at a table that’s practically overflowing with vessels of all kinds: bowls, bags, coffee mugs, sauce bottles, food containers, a small tub of cand

In 1993, the artist Glenn Ligon walked into Gay Treasures, a now defunct bookstore in Greenwich Village, New York, and purchased a box titled “Black Men,” a collection of pornographic images of men of color. The following year, in what would become A

Justine Kurland: Ezekiel Stark, the gentle narrator in your novel Men and Apparitions (2018), is an ethnographer who studies family photographs. Why did you want to write a book about photography and family? Lynne Tillman: I didn’t set out to write s

What is a grown man supposed to do with his mother? Ignore her. Help her. Visit her dutifully. Keep an emotional and intellectual distance. Bring the grandchildren around to show. Suffer with a plastic smile through Thanksgiving dinners. Keep the thi

When Sally Mann started photographing her kids and husband thirty years ago, it was probably the most interesting case of a photographer turning the lens on their immediate family since John William Draper covered his sister’s face in flour and made

The Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase is best known for his celebrated photobook Ravens (1986), a work in which he projected his sense of isolation and sadness, arising from his 1976 divorce, onto the figures of ravens. More than thirty years hav

In October 1996, the Armenian American photographer Diana Markosian was seven years old, living with her family in Moscow, when her mother told her and her brother to pack their things; they were going on a trip. She didn’t say where. “We left immedi

“I have found no standard art history that refers to any Afro-American artist,” Deborah Willis wrote on November 14, 1973, in a statement about her intention to research the contributions of black photographers working in the United States from 1840

It took a picnic in New York’s Central Park for Coko Xtravaganza to understand what the House of Xtravaganza meant when they called each other family. Having been inducted into the crew in 1983—after discovering house members on the piers on Manhatta

One spring after another this century, I have checked into an eleven-room guesthouse overlooking a small garden in the shadow of snowcaps. Each one of its sunlit rooms is decorated with a distinctive Tibetan mural, and each one is named after a parti

In 2007, the Boston-born Lebanese photographer George Awde began a series of color portraits of young men who had left their homes to settle in Beirut. Almost all of his subjects had fled to Lebanon from Syria, not because of political upheaval or ou

The family photograph is a marker of myths. It captures a fraction of a second of activity and fuels narratives for generations. The photographs that comprise Tammy Rae Carland’s 1998 series On Becoming are black-and-white staged portraits that merge

At the beginning of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short film, Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon), a young boy, played by the director’s real-life son, rescues a lone red balloon from the top of a Parisian lamppost. The balloon, like a friendly ghost, carrie

“I began making photographs and came out as a lesbian in that wonderful spring of 1971,” the photographer Cathy Cade once wrote in an artist’s statement. At the time, Cade was living in San Francisco and was already a seasoned activist. “I got the id

In the turbulent Boston of the 1970s, a wild group of friends in the city’s art schools began looking at themselves and the people who populated their world. They began making images—characterized by a deceptive casualness—so that others could see wh