Winter 2020

Aperture

Aperture: For Everyone Seriously Interested in Photography

Aperture1 min read
Aperture
Editor Michael Famighetti Managing Editor Brendan Embser Editorial Assistant Nicole Acheampong Copy Editors Olivia Casa, Donna Ghelerter Senior Production Manager True Sims Production Manager Andrea Chlad Art Direction, Design & Typefaces A2/SW/HK, L
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The Parameters Of Our Cage
I imagine society is entering a mourning phase confronting the fact that things will never be the same. First the pandemic, then the deconstruction of how we’ve always viewed the criminal justice system and the systemic racism embedded in everything.
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Curriculum
“The difficult thing about photography,” Paul Graham remarked in a 2015 interview, “is you have no idea where your photographs are. You’ve carved out time and space to do the work, but you just don’t know when or where pictures will arrive.” Over the
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Agenda
Gregory Halpern’s latest solo exhibition and photobook take their title, Let the Sun Beheaded Be, from the 1948 collection of surrealist poems Soleil cou coupé by the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire. A poetic thread is woven throughout
Aperture3 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Day Jobs
In the early 1980s, when Koto Bolofo made his first pictures for British Vogue, he worked night shifts at a West London supermarket. On set, he kept mum about his day job. “You had to have this pretense—‘Daddy’s quite rich,’” Bolofo says, wryly. “To
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Backstory
“Mary Ellen would never have made this book,” Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark’s husband and collaborator of more than thirty years, writes in an essay accompanying The Book of Everything, the three-volume collection of the photographer’s life’s work rec
Aperture2 min read
Utopia
The year 2020—that number suggests a kind of harmonious symmetry, promising clarity of sight. Yet this year has been numbingly askew. A sense of dystopian madness emerged on multiple fronts: a pandemic that preyed on the most vulnerable, a historic e
Aperture8 min read
Tyler Mitchell Love For A Common Way Of Life
“In nature, nothing is perfect.… Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” —Alice Walker Two bare-chested young Black men on playground swings. Staring slightly down at the camera, the first young man, with twisted hai
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Chris Jennings
It was less than a century after Thomas More’s beheading that the adjective utopian became shorthand for naive or outlandish aspirations. That is a shame. Far from being impractical, the utopian imagination is a sharp-edged tool for comprehending the
Aperture11 min read
Spaceship Earth
For more than a decade, the filmmaker Matt Wolf has won acclaim for his meticulously crafted documentaries that reveal lost histories through deep dives into media archives. His focus is often on radical outsiders whose projects range from the quixot
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David Benjamin Sherry
Over the past ten years, David Benjamin Sherry has been developing a project called American Spirit, dedicated to taking pictures across the United States in a “quest for empathy, commonality, and understanding in my American subjects and landscapes.
Aperture7 min read
Dreaming & Dwelling
The frontispiece of the original edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Leuven, Belgium, in 1516, depicts a small island, nearly round with deckled edges. The engraver’s hand shaded the landmass with short, neat hatch marks to suggest topograp
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Olivia Laing
Utopia definitely doesn’t involve pulling protesters into unmarked cars. It’s to do with land, with space, with the rights of bodies to be unexploited and unharmed. Utopia is wild roses; utopia is wearing a mask. Bottom line, utopia is generous, foun
Aperture3 min read
Allen Frame
It was a time like our own. A young man comes to New York and wants to be an artist. A president wants to make America great. A doctor sounds an alarm. A health crisis looms, like an overture in a minor key, but everyone goes to a bar called the Bar
Aperture8 min read
Feminist Futures
In Lorna Simpson’s Earth & Sky 2 (2018), part of a series of collaged portraits of Black women that Simpson has been making for a decade, a constellation glides in streaks and waves from a woman’s head. The subject looks straight out of the frame, on
Aperture8 min read
Remains Of The Day
Hrair Sarkissian traced the flight path of a migratory bird and found it looked exactly like a noose. He constructed a small model of the building where he spent most of his life in Damascus, then, over seven hours, bashed it to bits with a sledgeham
Aperture4 min read
Nicole R. Fleetwood
In the wake of the uprising against the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black people, many activists began to declare, “Abolish the police!” Signs calling for defunding and abolishing the police proliferated in medi
Aperture6 min read
The Future Will See You Now
It is the picture of rebirth, an image of the unease of transition. Profusely the sweat gathers, beading across Prince Luxury’s face and chest. His almond-shaped eyes are shut as his tongue reaches across gold grills capped onto his teeth, licking aw
Aperture4 min read
Steven S. Lee
Planned to stretch higher than the Eiffel Tower, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920) projected the utopian ambitions of the Bolsheviks and Constructivists alike. Its intertwined iron spirals were to contain three spinning gla
Aperture4 min read
Aikaterini Gegisian
High above a parking lot spins a fragment of a Ferris wheel. Across the blue waves of a postcard-perfect sea, an elaborate railing forms a row of overhead portholes. In the Greek Armenian artist Aikaterini Gegisian’s collages, contemporary artifacts
Aperture8 min read
The Black Fantastic
In May 1803, a slave ship bound for St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, neared its final destination. On board were seventy-five captives belonging to the Igbo peoples of West Africa. As the ship approached the island, the Igbo rose up in re
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Gareth McConnell
Alistair O’Neill is a professor of fashion history and theory at Central Saint Martins, London.
Aperture5 min read
Calling In The Spirit
Where can people of the Latinx community feel safe? After the history of colonialization and the experience of migration, how can we express a complex sense of spirituality in the United States? How can image making become ritual and serve our spirit
Aperture4 min read
Elvia Wilk
A cellular membrane, a star exploding, a face emerging from the darkness. A void, or a presence? A molecule, or a black hole? Dystopia, or possibility? Extinction, or transformation? The series of morphing radial shapes in Charlotte Pryce’s 2018 six-
Aperture3 min read
Balarama Heller Sacred place
At the center of any spiritual life lie clarity, simplicity, and devotion. We may see and hear the members of, say, the Hare Krishna movement parading through our streets in a jangle of bells and dance, and that seems a vibrant expression of their gr
Aperture2 min read
Endnote
A writer, musicologist, and former army psyops officer, Roger Steffens chronicled the alternative lives of 1960s-era American counterculture. The Family Acid, the popular Instagram handle for his archive, is now the subject of three books. Where does

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