Spring 2024

Aperture

Aperture: For Everyone Seriously Interested in Photography

Aperture1 min read
Aperture
Editor in Chief Michael Famighetti Senior Editor Brendan Embser Associate Managing Editor Varun Nayar Contributing Editors, The PhotoBook Review Noa Lin, Lesley A. Martin Copy Editors Hilary Becker, Donna Ghelerter, Chris Peterson Production Director
Aperture3 min read
Exhibitions to See
A leading photographer and critic, Takuma Nakahira had a lasting impact on Japanese art after World War II, from his poetic images to his perceptive writing on art and his work as a founder of Provoke—an influential, short-lived magazine of experimen
Aperture4 min readGender Studies
Viewfinder
It is 1994 in Tokyo and Mariko Mori is angry. She has just come out of a business meeting, and is appalled to find that intelligent women, with degrees from leading universities, are being made to serve tea while working at the office. She has recent
Aperture4 min read
Dispatches
For much of last summer, the mountains on the North Shore appeared to buffer Vancouver from the smoke of forest fires that had engulfed the rest of Canada. Even with its summer breeze of cedar and sea, the city felt uneasy. In particular, the infamou
Aperture3 min read
Backstory
In Bombay, the restless metropolis that houses India’s twelve-billion-dollar Hindi cinema industry, the 1990s were a moment of roiling change. The cultural and visual excesses that had dictated the medium for the last decade were winding down, but th
Aperture3 min read
Curriculum
The Razor’s Edge, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1946, is a movie I repeatedly return to for solace and respite from contemporary life. Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel of the same name, it tracks the odyssey of a World War I fi
Aperture10 min read
Studio Visit
“My dream was to get out of New Haven,” writes Jim Goldberg in his 2017 photobook, Candy, a coming-of-age story that tracks his 1973 move west and the beginnings of his life as an artist, a seeker, and a man in near-constant motion. Goldberg’s eye wa
Aperture2 min read
Counter Histories
What could an archive of the future look like? What creative possibilities are offered by the gaps, absences, and silences in historical records? How can artists engage with histories that weren’t photographed? How can found images contribute to a fu
Aperture9 min readWorld
For So Many Years When I Close My Eyes
When Yu Lai Wai-ling’s son disappeared from Hong Kong into China, she embarked on a tireless investigation to find him. The photographer Billy H.C. Kwok has assembled an archive related to her search—piecing together a twisting story of grief and res
Aperture3 min read
The Country
A vast and variegated holiday destination, a bottomless repository of cheap Black labor, and a site of bitterly fought wars of resistance against colonial dispossession—South Africa’s Eastern Cape is as beautiful as it is unknowable. The province occ
Aperture7 min read
We See It All
As a high school student in Puerto Rico, around 2005, Christopher Gregory-Rivera grew active in student movements that fought university tuition hikes. His mother wasn’t happy about it. “She would say, ‘Cuidado, te van a carpetear,’ which meant that
Aperture3 min read
Searching for Cayenne
Like the writers Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant before her, Cédrine Scheidig is, to borrow the words of Glissant’s American translator, a distinguished theorist of “Caribbean self-formation.” Born in 1994 in the Seine-Saint-Denis su
Aperture4 min read
The “Good” Change
A gray-haired woman looks upward intently, her gaze fixed, head tilted back, and face mask lowered to amplify her shout—a picture of defiance. Taken by the Polish artist and photojournalist Agata Szymanska-Medina, it’s among the striking portraits in
Aperture4 min read
The Right To A Memory
In a pivotal scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which tracks the strategic operations of the National Liberation Front during the early years of Algeria’s war of independence against France, three female militants clandestin
Aperture4 min read
Descendants
Recently, moving to New York from Miami, after living there for over two decades, with each box I packed I wrestled with what to let go and what to keep. There was no hesitation about the family photo-albums, many of which I’d inherited from my mothe
Aperture8 min read
Fighting Times
Amid the radical imagery of Alice Proujansky’s project Hard Times are Fighting Times (2023), the presence of something as conventional as a baby book stops you in your tracks. One of many objects the photographer has held on to from her childhood, th
Aperture1 min read
New from Aperture
I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now US $75.00 / UK £60.00 Ernest Cole: The True America US $65.00 / UK £50.00 Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama Hail the Dark Lioness, Vol. II US $85.00 / UK £70.00 Pao Houa Her
Aperture7 min read
The Artist’s Library
Ari Marcopoulos’s personal library reflects kinetic engagements with subcultures of the world that connect to his own wide-ranging work. “Already, look, we’re surrounded by them,” Marcopoulos, a photographer and filmmaker, said during a recent visit
Aperture10 min read
A Peculiar Feeling of Reality
“This stocky, unrevealing box stands 3 ft. high without stockings or feet and lights up like a Xmas tree no matter what I show it.” So begins an entry about the photocopy machine, typed on a small placard, by Pati Hill, the American artist and writer
Aperture3 min read
Endnote
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland features numerous photographs, including one of Dolours Price, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who was photographed in the 1970s for the Italian publication L’Eu

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