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23 Articles

VINCE ALETTI (“The Theater of Paul Kooiker,” page 132), the former art editor and photography critic at the Village Voice, wrote weekly photo exhibition reviews for the New Yorker from 2005 to 2016 and now contributes to the magazine’s online Photo Booth feature. In 2019, he published Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines. His book The Drawer (2022) was named the Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook of the Year in 2023. THESSALY LA FORCE (“Coreen Simpson: Past Lives,” page 110) is a writer based in New York. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications. She recently published a short story in the book Five Stories for Philip Guston (2023). OLIVIA LAING (“Endnote,”…

Japanese Women Photographers A much-needed counterpoint to the male-dominated canon of Japanese photography, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, curated by Pauline Vermare, Mariko Takeuchi, and Lesley A. Martin, presents a wide range of photographic approaches, including installation-based work, video, and the printed page. Coinciding with a book published by Aperture, I’m So Happy provides an indispensable introduction to the contributions of Japanese women to photography, showcasing intimate observations of everyday life, critical perspectives on history, and radical experiments with the medium. I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now at Rencontres d’Arles, France, July 1–September 29, 2024 Akinbode Akinbiyi When asked about his street photographs, Akinbode Akinbiyi once said: “I am looking for my childhood.”…

Jupiter has ninety-five moons. Earth, one. Judging from the number of photographs of our singular satellite, one might think there were more objects in our orbit. Silver moons have filled books, blogs, almanacs, and atlases for almost two hundred years. All are pictures of the same thing, yet each photograph of the moon is unique. The unchangeable subject highlights the medium’s variability. Just as the moon reflects the sun’s light, these pictures reflect back to us something about photography itself. John W. Draper’s daguerreotype is often erroneously described as the first photograph of the moon; in fact, it is only the earliest known surviving example. The historian Dan Streible has tracked down this image’s many appearances—reversed, color corrected, misattributed—arguing that these copies derive from a daguerreotype likely made on March…

Early in the BBC documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (2023), a powerful collection of personal testimonies on the Troubles, one speaker recalls his childhood excitement during the first waves of civil unrest. “It was mad … it was like a movie,” he reminisces, thinking back on the innocent elation he experienced as mass protests, running street battles, and military patrols became regular features of everyday life. Inevitably, as the daily drama intensified, with bombings, shootings, and funerals dominating the headlines, the desperate gravity of the situation became clear. Even to kids playing with pretend guns on the backstreets of Derry and Belfast, as the BBC interviewee remembers, “this was serious … it wasn’t like a movie anymore.” The Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura first visited Northern Ireland…

There’s one townhouse on Bergen Street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn that doesn’t look like any of the others. Instead of traditional brownstone, a layer of cement, raked with tines into rhythmic grooves, covers the facade from the garden level to the roofline. The house belongs to the photographer Stefan Ruiz, and it’s getting a makeover. “Basically, most of the places have been fixed up at least once or twice,” Ruiz told me when I visited last winter. “There are still a few people who have been here for fifty years or more. It’s gotten way fancier.” Ruiz lives and works on the lower two floors and rents out the two apartments above. The downstairs contains his archive of magazines, negatives, and work prints. The cabinets are covered…

A prolific photographer, editor, publisher, and champion of NFTs, Alejandro Cartagena has portrayed the often surreal consequences of importing the American dream across the Mexican border. He has photographed workers in truck beds from an overpass and offered tips for politicians taking selfies. For his decade-long chronicle on the effects of real-estate speculation in Monterrey, Mexico, where he lives and works, Cartagena produced a “For Dummies”–style guidebook complete with tips about choosing a good neighborhood. DISCARDED PHOTOGRAPHS I started going to flea markets on the outskirts of Mexico City in the mid-2010s and became obsessed with the idea of collecting discarded objects, especially photographs. The ones I found had lost their original meaning and had become malleable, open to reinterpretation. I continue to collect and classify them. They are a…

In her poem “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde speaks of the precarious experience of living with the knowledge that one’s survival is not only not guaranteed but actively, purposefully threatened. Avion Pearce borrowed a line from Lorde for the title of their series In the Hours Between Dawn (2022–24), an ode to the possibilities of the midnight hours. The experience of the queer and trans community of color in Brooklyn that Pearce photographs is a testament to Lorde’s words. Survival—half shrouded, yet insistent—can appear in forms both soft and strong. Pearce, who works with 8-by-10 and medium-format cameras, considers how photography shapes ideas about identity and history. “I was looking at some of the tools that have been used to construct these ideas,” Pearce told me recently, describing their…

The Design Issue

Yes, that’s right, this issue of Aperture is a little different. We’ve introduced some design changes to make the magazine slightly more inviting, easier to hold, to fit in your bag, to take and read on the go—or to sit with while you peruse at home. While the format may be different, the same editorial spirit drives this publication, running since 1952: a commitment to presenting a spectrum of ideas and photography, from past and present, reproduced with care and thoughtfully considered through engaging, approachable writing. We live in a strange, beguiling, sometimes uneasy but always evolving world of images. We hope to help make sense of it all. Aperture’s design has shifted numerous times over the past seven decades. The very first issue was a modest 6 ¼ by…

The Design Issue

Duro Olowu Cutting a Figure

The former lawyer turned designer Duro Olowu creates fashion moments on a resolutely human scale. Born in Lagos into a Nigerian Jamaican family, Olowu had a cosmopolitan upbringing, traveling to Europe and absorbing cultural influences ranging from album covers to Yves Saint Laurent. His tenacious curiosity, like his patternmaking, seems limitless—and his deep knowledge of photography has informed his fashion line. Instead of flashy runway shows, Olowu prefers private viewings that allow him to discuss his patchwork dresses and jacquard coats with the coterie of cultural figures who wear his richly patterned designs. Like him, they appreciate clothes in a context that celebrates collecting antiques, paintings, and handicrafts over any proximity to trends or celebrity endorsements. Olowu has also curated exhibitions in New York, London, and Chicago. On each occasion,…

Duro Olowu Cutting a Figure

Hartt’s nuanced approach to addressing identity and colonial history is evident in his way of thinking about images. TUVALU IS SINKING. In a few decades, the island nation in the South Pacific might be mostly waves. Many of us know this from the internet, the island’s submersion a de facto symbol of climate change, much like starving polar bears stranded on floating icebergs. The artist David Hartt knows about Tuvalu because he went there in 2015 to make a film called Adrift and to witness firsthand the effects of rising sea levels. He’s traveled to swamplands in Florida and to Jamaica, where the artist Frederic Church sketched plein air studies. And he found the exact location in Ohio where the landscape painter Robert Duncanson set his easel for Blue Hole,…

Ferrari LUIGI GHIRRI

Luigi Ghirri did not preoccupy himself with cars, but he did enjoy driving. He owned a number of Volkswagen Beetles that were constantly breaking down. In the 1980s, he switched to a Volvo station wagon, paragon of Swedish vehicular functionality and safety. An accumulation of unpaid traffic fines suggests he may not have been a great driver, or that he was blasé about traffic rules. Nonetheless, he crisscrossed Italy and Europe taking the photographs for which he is now celebrated: unpeopled landscapes that rush toward a vanishing point, architectural details, found images within images pasted around a town. All are realized in soft washes of warm color that cushion reality, making it feel ever so distant and dreamlike. Adele Ghirri, his daughter, who now manages his estate and archive from…

Ferrari LUIGI GHIRRI

Dayanita Singh Better Living

Architecture and photography have always been intimately connected. These media share a few fundamentals: impacts of light and air, the balance of surface and depth, interiority and exteriority, and how these relations are mediated by the human body. Attending to such concerns has guided the expansive, fluid artistic practice of Dayanita Singh, whose open-ended approach to the photographic image has led to distinctive architectural modes of display. Encased in teak frames, screens, and boxes that often double as display cases which can be placed on walls and bookshelves, Singh’s photographs circulate in modular forms that are adjustable to individual taste. They underscore how images accrue meaning over time, as people live and grow alongside them. “To me, a photograph is something you touch and you move and it warps and…

Dayanita Singh Better Living

Daniel Shea Empire Plaza

Of all the epithets coined by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s opponents to describe his monumental redevelopment plan for the seat of state government in Albany—and there were many, ranging from “Nelson’s Pyramid” to “Rocky’s Edifice Complex” to an array of creative if mostly unprintable plays on the resonance between his notorious penchant for philandering and the primordial symbolism of a nice big tower—the one that must have stung the most was “Brasília North.” This was not just a riff on the governor’s pharaonic ambition, or a dig at his Freudian drive to outdo a father who, after putting the family name on Rockefeller Center, had become the most famous developer in the world. It was a statement of fact: the Albany project really was inspired in part by the…

Daniel Shea Empire Plaza

Alice Rawsthorn Design Touches Everything

The design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn counts the photographer and filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book of essays Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, in which he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design is characterized by resourcefulness, invention, and the needs of a community. This principle carries through Rawsthorn’s work, where she consistently champions design’s potential to address complex challenges facing societies around the globe. In 2020, Rawsthorn cofounded the Design Emergency project with the Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli, to investigate the design response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project started with an Instagram account. It’s now also a podcast, YouTube channel, and a book, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future.…

Alice Rawsthorn Design Touches Everything

With no inherent relation to scale, materiality, or context, the photographic image is a response to not only its subject but also the myriad possible forms it can take. After image “capture” comes output, and the choices of output are almost unlimited. The image might be printed on the pages of books and magazines, blown up into billboards or murals, incorporated into sculpture, painted over, collaged, projected, illuminated, compressed, digitized, or networked. And none of these formats need be definitive: the image can (and very often does) change shape, adapt, evolve, and exist in different states simultaneously. For photography, the space of exhibition has frequently been an arena for experimentation and a forum for exploring relations to associated fields such as graphic design, architecture, and networked tools of communication. The…

The Shape of Things

IMAGINE HAVING LOST A LOVED one in the New England of the 1870s. Then, a knock at your door: a salesman in a suit. He pulls out a bound catalog of albumen-silver prints, with as many photographs in it as you’ve maybe seen in a lifetime, each showing a tombstone ready to memorialize your loss. The trade catalog for the Vermont Marble Companies offers a purchase for your grief, documentation that something exists in the here and now to honor those in the hereafter. This is an example of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s research assistant Virginia McBride calls “the truth claim of photography,” a way companies used the supposed veracity of photographic images to convince customers they would deliver what they promised. It’s an early highlight of a…

The Shape of Things

IN 1983, THE PHOTOGRAPHER and jewelry designer Coreen Simpson began going once a week to the Roxy, a beating heart of New York City’s downtown nightlife, where, on select nights, hip-hop music fresh from the Bronx pulsed and throbbed. Simpson, then a forty-one-year-old working mother, was far from a regular. She had recently taken a picture of two young men in fedoras who had caught her eye on the subway, and her daughter had suggested she visit the Roxy, thinking she might find it fertile ground for her portraiture work. Inside the club, Simpson set up a small makeshift studio. Her boyfriend at the time, the artist George Mingo, came along to watch her equipment while Simpson scouted the dance floor for subjects. On and off, over several years, she…

Nhu Xuan Hua’s photographs defy easy interpretation. A woman sings karaoke in a shining, armored gown. An archival wedding photograph is beguilingly redacted, dress and suit visible but the bodies of husband and wife absent contours. A black dog gazes out the entrance of a temple—who, or what, is it guarding? Even the simplest image is limned with story; we sense it the way we remember our dreams upon waking. Hua’s powerful narrative vision shines through in the clarity of her photographs, which unfold like time passing in slow motion. Born in Paris to Vietnamese immigrant parents, Hua grew up within a French culture that prized assimilation as a mode of survival. It wasn’t until after finishing her studies in photography at the Lycée Auguste Renoir Paris in 2011 and…

The Theater of Paul Kooiker

For all their polish, there’s something about Paul Kooiker’s pictures that feels outsider, something obsessive and off. Even when he’s photographing ordinary subjects—an egg, a wig, a shoe, an eyeball—in a relatively straightforward style, the results look alien. Maybe that’s why the Dutch photographer, who has published nineteen books since 1999, remains a cult figure. His latest book, Fashion (2023), is the source for much of the work in the portfolio that follows, and an ideal starting point for anyone curious about his oeuvre as a whole, which is so various it’s difficult to pin down. Based in Amsterdam, Kooiker has a neo-Dadaist approach to subject matter, notably a deadpan take on the still life, which makes him especially appealing to brands, such as Acne, Hermès, and Rick Owens, that…

The Theater of Paul Kooiker

Poetic Research

Polymode started as a concept before becoming a business in 2014. Its cofounders, Silas Munro and Brian Johnson—who first met at RISD and have collaborated over the years from North Carolina and California—dismantle the idea of designers who leave their identities behind. By using what they call “poetic research,” the partners insert their lived experiences and artistic perspectives into their work. To further this embracing mindset, the two have also founded a series of design-history courses with a BIPOC focus. Dori Tunstall: Can you tell us the origin story of Polymode and how it is closely intertwined with your friendship? Silas Munro: “Polymode” was the title of my master’s thesis at CalArts, which I completed in 2008. That’s where the name of the studio comes from. That thesis was about…

Poetic Research

Elements of Style

Paging through vintage magazines feels like falling into a time warp. The cost of fashion and beauty products alone is boggling ($6.95 for suede gloves! $15 for a wool dress!). They serve as unique capsules from a bygone era of style and fantasy, a time when the people at the helm could make or break artistic careers. One such kingmaker was Alexey Brodovitch, whose art direction for Harper’s Bazaar, across decades, from the mid-1930s through the 1950s, set a new standard for graphic design and photography in magazines. The recent book Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me (Yale University Press, 2024; 174 pages, $50), which accompanied an exhibition last spring at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, demonstrates the breadth of not only Brodovitch’s career but of his artistic prowess, from paintings and…

Elements of Style

The Designer’s Bookshelf

There are proper photobooks, showcasing the work of a single photographer’s accomplishments, and then there are books that use photography in the service of something else, as a manual, guide, illustration, or history lesson. For this issue, we invited a group of graphic designers to select some of their favorite books that use photographs to delve into a range of ideas related to design. Sonya Dyakova The Art of Papercraft (B. T. Batsford, 1971) by Hiroshi Ogawa is a comprehensive guide to the Japanese art of paper sculpture. It contains more than 110 photographs, with great attention to detail. The images are dramatic and atmospheric, as if the sculptures are suspended in space and time. The black background and soft shadows enhance the beauty of the shapes. Ogawa provides not only…

The Designer’s Bookshelf

How did your new book on gardens and paradise begin? I’ve been working on it since 2020, but the initial stages were restoring the physical garden itself and keeping a garden diary. I originally trained as a herbalist, so I’ve been thinking about plants and utopia for a long time. The book is part memoir, part cultural history. There’s one section where you describe botany as an education in looking. Yes, a very fine-grained looking, where you’re looking with precision to identify and differentiate—which isn’t the only kind of looking I’m interested in anymore. How much did the change and calamity of the pandemic shift your focus? The intense isolation of the pandemic happening at the same time as issues such as Black Lives Matter, and that entire conversation about…

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