Aperture

Founded in 1952, Aperture is an essential guide to the world of contemporary photography that combines the finest writing with inspiring photographic portfolios. Each issue examines one theme explored in “Words,” focused on the best writing surrounding contemporary photography, and “Pictures,” featuring immersive portfolios and artist projects.

Aperture

Contributors

Agenda • Exhibitions to See

Backstory • On Robert Frank’s centennial, MoMA charts six decades of his photographs and films, including genre-bending collaborations with musicians.

Viewfinder • Legacy Russell parses the racial codes of American visual culture.

Redux • Rafael Goldchain captured tender moments against a backdrop of political violence in Latin America.

Dispatches • In India’s seaside town of Panjim, an archival project conjures Goa’s cosmopolitan past.

Curriculum

Preview • High above San Francisco Bay, Richard Misrach creates a sublime but eerie vision of global trade.

Interview • Emmet Gowin has been sorting through decades of photographs, discovering unseen images and memories.

Arrhythmic Mythic Ra • It seems the photographs that I’m most drawn to in my conscious looking life push against our preconceived notions of social and aesthetic norms, images that are abrasive to our tastes, that make our model of the world more complicated. Photography, the outlier, is most adept at reminding us of instability and fallibilities. I believe we all need to observe things we don’t understand. And as someone who makes pictures, I’m reminded that a photograph, by its nature, can deliver more about the subject than even the photographer or the subject intend. With this in mind, I have arranged a constellation of images that operate like texts and texts that operate like pictures—fragmented, arrhythmic, mythic.

Field Guide to Wildflowers

let fani willis fuck

Impossible Truths

Imagination • We live in a shadow of the society we could have.

’Tis of Thee

Photographs and works:

The PhotoBook Review

Unbound Journeys • In 2022, the Beirut-born photographer and designer Roï Saade founded Bound Narratives, a roving archive, workshop, and exhibition program conceived to promote photo-books by Middle Eastern and North African artists. Packing his library into several suitcases, Saade has brought Bound Narratives to Beirut, Florence, Montreal, and Sarajevo, and plans to soon take it to Tunis and Egypt. Here, he discusses the struggle against Eurocentric publishing norms, his process-driven approach, and how photobooks can redraw lines of belonging.

Illuminations • A long-awaited anthology highlights Black women in British photography.

Reviews

Endnote • In her writing about life on the margins, Rachel Kushner has established herself as a storyteller of devastating precision and unsentimental compassion. Her new novel, Creation Lake (2024), finds the author revisiting themes of revolution, agency, and betrayal, linking a French anarchist collective with the mysterious caves of early humans.