Search results for ""Aperture""

Presence is a thrilling immersion into the personal collection of photographer and humanitarian Judy Glickman Lauder. Nearly 160 images by some eighty photographers, selected from Judy Glickman Lauder’s collection of over 650 prints, explore the idea of “presence” of the human spirit. This stunningly designed album showcases the imagery of beloved and influential photographers of the twentieth century, such as Berenice Abbott, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Nan Goldin, Susan Meiselas, Gordon Parks, Sebastião Salgado, Weegee, and James Van Der Zee. Spanning Pictorialism, portraiture, and fashion, to documentary and photojournalism, and featuring iconic figures from the fields of art, politics, entertainment, and social justice, Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder celebrates photography’s ability to capture the human experience. Essays by Anjuli Lebowitz and Adam D. Weinberg provide historical and artistic context, while an autobiographical essay by Glickman Lauder tells the story of her collection. This book accompanies an exhibition drawn from the Judy Glickman Lauder Collection at the Portland Museum of Art, to which the Collection has been gifted. Published by Aperture in partnership with the Portland Museum of Art, Maine

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Palestinian French artist Taysir Batniji is the third recipient of Immersion, a French American Photography Commission, a program launched by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in alliance with Aperture Foundation. In Home Away from Home , Batniji brings together photographs, selections from family archives, drawings, and writings to explore the sense of dislocation and the different ideas of “home” experienced by various members of his family who immigrated to the United States from the Middle East. As Batniji explains, “The state of ‘between-ness’—cultural as well as geographic—is an issue that has preoccupied me since I first arrived in France in 1995. Exile, displacement, and mobility are themes that have driven my work for many years.” The work Batniji has created, during visits to Florida and California, strives to connect to and understand his “American cousins” through their daily lives, the objects that surround them, and the homes they have made. The resulting photographs and portraits, interviews, and sketches from memory of the family homestead in Gaza question what it means to share a history, even among relative strangers—and what happens to a sense of the past and of belonging when opting for new identities and new homes.

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In the “Curiosity” issue of Aperture magazine, Sarah Bay Gachot writes that Robert Cumming’s interest in photography spawned from his interest in perception: “Cumming wanted the viewer to get to know, personally, the process of perception—perhaps to ward off the onset of visual inertia. The pictures unfold slowly over time; the more you look, the more you see.” The Difficulties of Nonsense features Cumming’s conceptual black-and-white and color photographs from the 1970s, revealing his fascination with illusion and trickery. From his base in Los Angeles, Cumming made functional-looking constructions, rendered useless and created primarily to be photographed with his 8-by-10 camera. Playing with props, proportions, unusual angles, light, and mirrors, the images invite viewers to look in—and then to second-guess what they see. As the first publication to survey this significant series, The Difficulties of Nonsense serves as a touchstone for contemporary artists and for those interested in artwork that came out of Los Angeles in the 1970s. With an essay by Sarah Bay Gachot and an interview by David Campany, this monograph pays homage to a time when Cumming, and many in the photographic community, worked to playfully push the boundaries of photography and narrative.

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Twenty years ago, before the era of digital cameras, cell phones, Photoshop, and the World Wide Web, Fred Ritchin presciently outlined many of the ways in which the digital age would transform society. His groundbreaking book, In Our Own Image, the first to address “the coming revolution in photography,” asked pointed and sometimes chilling questions that are increasingly relevant today, including whether democracy can survive the erosion of media accelerated by facile use of digital means. By the time a second edition was published in 1999, many of Ritchin’s predictions had come true: computer embellishment of imagery had become a staple in the media and, given the widespread use of graphic so!ware, had significantly diminished photography’s special role as a credible witness: Newsday had published the first “future” news photograph of two feuding ice skaters as they would meet the next day, and on its cover, Time magazine darkened and blurred an image of the celebrity O. J. Simpson in order to li! “a common police mug shot to the level of art, with no sacrifice to truth.” Aperture is pleased to reissue this seminal text, which has continued to shape the debate about digital imaging since its initial publication. This twentiethanniversary edition features a preface by the author that contextualizes the book for a contemporary audience.

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Collects over 150 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, with over two hundred photographs taken from 1850 to present The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience—from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy—appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity. A Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Lê. Insightful texts by Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern United States as an essential American story. Copublished by Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta

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Paolo Ventura’s Short Stories are whimsical narratives told through pictures—tales of love, war, and family—where things magically appear or disappear, set in an imaginary past of World War II Italy. Much like in silent films, the drama unfolds with no words or captions. For these works, Ventura constructed life-sized sets, in which he situated himself and members of his family (casting his son, wife, and twin brother as actors), in stories that are at once charming and disquieting. While seemingly simple, Ventura’s vignettes come with larger implications: brothers who encounter each other by surprise on the battlefield, jugglers who appear from above, a man who packs himself into his suitcase, a small-town magician who accidently makes his son disappear for real, and many others. Here, Ventura has built a world of realistic proportions and actors, in fantastical tales and against painted backdrops—challenging notions of what is real and what is make-believe. This book collects the entire series of Ventura’s Short Stories together for the first time, including three previously unpublished, and offers a glimpse into the artist’s extraordinary imagination. Paolo Ventura (born in Milan, 1968) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 1991. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Forma International Center for Photography, Milan; Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France; and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. He also created a series of works for the Italian pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. His works have been acquired by prominent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Margulies Collection, Miami. His monographs include War Souvenir (2006), Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), and The Automaton (2012).

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Alone Street brings together two major bodies of work by Gregory Crewdson, Cathedral of the Pines (Aperture, 2016) and An Eclipse of Moths (Aperture, 2020), in a single, elegant, and affordable monograph. Both series expand on the artist’s obsessive exploration of the psychogeography of small-town, post-industrial New England and underscore the precision and depth of Crewdson’s unique mode of photographic storytelling. In each image, light, color, and carefully crafted scenography evoke the feeling that, as art historian Alexander Nemerov has astutely described, “all that ever happened in these places seems crystallized in his tableaux, as if the quiet melancholy of Crewdson’s scenes gathered the unruly sorrows and other little-guessed feelings of people long-gone who once stood on those spots.” In addition to the full set of images from each series, Alone Street, presents a selection of behind-the-scenes images and storyboards, revealing the extensive preparation and planning that went into the making of each work.

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To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, they were rediscovered at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976. This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume features essays by prominent scholars who explore such topics as the identities of the people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement. Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press

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Diana Markosian's Father is an intimate and engrossing diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection, recounted through documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera. Diana Markosian: Father presents the photographer's journey to another place and another time, where Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar strangerher long-lost father. The book explores her father's absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. The images, made over the course of a decade, take place in her father's home in Armenia. In Markosian's first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family's journey from postSoviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Father uses both documentary photographs and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the fifteen years of absence and separation from the photographer's childhood. In this voyage of self-discovery, Ma

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Dutch artist Jacqueline Hassink has received critical acclaim for her books and exhibitions that deal conceptually with issues of power and social relations. Car Girls is a body of work that Hassink has created over five years, photographing major car shows in seven different cities on three continents. As she describes it, she has used these sites to reflect on “differing cultural values with regard to their ideal images of beauty and women. The series captures the moments during the women’s performances when they become more like dolls or tools than individuals.” In an issue of Aperture magazine, Francine Prose praised the work for its ability to “make us rethink the association between auto and eros as if it had never occurred to us, and to see it newly in all its sheer outrageous strangeness.” Car Girls takes a subversively fun yet conceptually astute approach to issues of gender, power, and commodification. This luxuriously produced publication is designed by the award-winning Irma Boom, and is limited to an edition of 1,500 copies.

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Bettina is the first monograph to showcase the work of the previously unsung artist Bettina Grossman, whose wildly interdisciplinary practice spanned photography, sculpture, textile, cinema, drawing, and more.An eccentric personality fully dedicated to her art, Bettina lived in the famous Chelsea Hotel from 1968 until her death in late 2021. In her tiny studio, she produced and accumulated a considerable body of work, much of which has remained unseen and unpublished until now. Her interests ranged from geometric and abstract studies, drawn from observations of people on the street, to pieces that transformed language into graphic, abstract “verbal forms.” Incorporating strategies of chance and the abstraction of everyday form through repetition and seriality, Bettina pushed the photographic medium to and beyond its limits. As Robert Blackburn, artist and founder of the Printmaking Workshop, astutely observed of Bettina’s work: “The photography, film, sculpture are as one, for the photographic medium is employed not only for documentation but as an endless source of inspiration from which other disciplines emerge—and merge.” Bettina was the winner of the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2020 and is copublished by Aperture and Éditions Xavier Barral.

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In his project Community Fire, the photographer Zhang Xiao takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (社火), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural Northern Chinese communities that includes temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling. Shehuo— literally, “community fire”—is devoted to the worship of land and fire, and boasts a history of many thousands of years. During the festival, people hold ceremonies, pray for the next year’s good harvest, and confer blessings of peace and safety on all family members. However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with myriad regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. In the early 2000s, Shehuo received an “intangible cultural heritage” designation from the People’s Republic of China, resulting in increased funding in exchange for greater government involvement. While altering the practitioners’ relation to Shehuo, this change expresses itself most visually in the way costumes and props have been replaced with newer, cheaper products from online shopping websites. Zhang’s colorful and fantastical photographs capture how these mass-produced substitutions have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Community Fire—with essays in English and Chinese—is a dynamic visual exploration of one of China’s oldest traditions. Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press

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In fall 2012, the hardcover edition of this book was released to critical acclaim and received several awards, including the 2013 American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for its innovative collaborative approach and design. Now available in a smaller, more afford - able paperback edition, Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photo-graphic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff ’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book, however, is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.

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Pieter Hugo has garnered critical acclaim for his series of portraits and landscapes, each of which explore a facet of his native South Africa and neighboring African countries, including the film sets of Nigeria’s Nollywood; and toxic garbage dumps in Ghana; and sites of mass executions in Rwanda, as well as albinos, the Hyena Men of Nigeria, honey collectors, and garbage scavengers. Kin , a collection of images shot throughout South Africa over the past decade, focuses instead on the photgrapher’s family, his community, and himself. Writer John Mahoney characterizes it as the artist’s first major work to focus exclusively on his personal experience in his native South Africa, a place defined by centuries of political, cultural, and racial tensions and contradictions. Hugo describes his series as “an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being ‘colonial driftwood.’ South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded, and problematic place . . . How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent should one try? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society?” This work attempts to address these questions and reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives.

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For over twenty years, Swedish photographer JH Engström has lived and worked in Paris, a city that, like New York, has a long photographic pedigree; countless photographers have been inspired by its iconic architecture and busy streets. Sketch of Paris, however, is hardly a catalog of classic Parisian scenes, offering instead a raw yet lyrical portrayal of the artist’s misadventures, loves, and random encounters in its streets, bars, and artist lofts—an entirely personal Paris. Drawing more from Nan Goldin and Anders Petersen than Eugène Atget or Henri Cartier-Bresson, Engström brings us on a gritty, no-holds-barred guided tour of life in his adopted city. The photographs provide a type of homage to Paris, a city that has greatly influenced and inspired Engström—as a photographer and as a person. The book brings together 250 color and black-and-white photographs—self-portraits, nudes, portraits of lovers, friends, strangers, and the occasional street scene—all shot between 1991 and 2012, tracing a critical time during the development of the artist’s own voice and vision.

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Although best known for his large-format color photographs made with vintage Kodak Brownie cameras, William Christenberry has also consistently produced work with 35 mm Kodachrome slide film ever since he took up photography. William Christenberry: Kodachromes is the first publication to showcase this stunning and previously unknown body of work, spanning from 1964 to 2007, of which only a small number of images have ever been published or exhibited. As in all of Christenberry’s photographs, the subject matter is the rural Deep South: the twisting back roads, open landscapes, rusted signage, and ramshackle vernacular architecture found in Hale County, Alabama. Though many of the sites pictured in this rare collection are new, other subjects grew iconic in Christenberry’s oeuvre as he has returned to photograph them for decades—the red building in the forest, Sprott Church, the Palmist Sign, and the Bar-B-Q Inn, among others. However, the photographs in William Christenberry: Kodachromes, made with a camera that allowed for greater mobility, reveal new ways of considering Christenberry’s perennial subjects and o!er further insight into the working method of this venerable artist.

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 A celebrated return of Robert Frank’s seminal photobook, The Americans, to Aperture’s catalog—one of the most important bodies of photographic work ever made.In the nearly seven decades since its publication in France in 1958, and in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption and injustice, and the stark reality of the American Dream. Frank’s point of view—at once startling and tenacious—is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a poignant and incomparable portrait of the nation at a turning point in history.This edition of The A

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T&HFL12 After a lifetime of working on a series of “collective portraits” in far-flung places such as Mexico; Ghana; Italy; Tir a’Mhurain, Scotland; and his adoptive country, France, an aging Paul Strand decided to concentrate on still lifes and the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France, as a site in which to distill his discoveries as a photographer. The work that constitutes The Garden at Orgeval is marked by close and careful study of the forms and patterns within nature—of tiny buttonshaped flowers, cascading winter branches, and fierce snarls of twigs. While the images bear the same directness and precise vision that is quintessentially Strand, the work also reflects a growing metaphorical turn. Renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz—whose own affinity toward Strand’s Orgeval series stems from a lifetime of photographing in different genres and ultimately returning to nature as an enduring subject—will select the photographs in the book, and respond to them in an accompanying personal essay, reflecting on issues, including the contemplation of one’s garden and growing old. Beautifully produced in a modest size, in the manner of a volume of poems, this book’s task is to do credit to Strand’s final work, both as an individual and as a key figure in Modernist photography.

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Ari Marcopoulos is an inveterate maker of zines. This project collects in one volume for the first time a selection of zines by Marcopoulos, many never before released, providing a unique insight and overview into an essential part of this influential artist’s daily practice. Often self-published or created in collaboration with boutique and independent publishers like ROMA, Dashwood Books, and PPP Editions, these informal, DIY-aesthetic creations function as sketchbook, diary, installation space, and a means of processing Marcopoulos’s daily practice of photographing his life, his family, his neighborhood, and the rarified cultural milieu in which he operates. This collection showcases an impressive array of printed zines, exploring each as an artistic object through an engaging layout. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically per year, key zines are featured—including some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen, making PDF zines—and punctuated by individual images presented full scale. An interview with Hamza Walker underscores the role of zines as an essential part of Marcopoulos’s artistic practice, emphasizing the personal, diaristic element within the work, while an essay from Maggie Nelson meditates on the work’s position within a wider social and cultural context. Ari Marcopoulos: Zines is a must-have for anyone interested in this prolific artist’s personal practice and zine culture.

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The first monograph by sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer Shikeith, Notes towards Becoming a Spill brings together a series of striking studio portraits of Black male subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. Shikeith describes the work as “leaning into the uncanny,” visualizing ritual and the process of excavating Black men’s erotic potential, the better to exorcise the “intangible presences that haunt their bodies and psyches.” The men’s faces and bodies glisten with sweat (and tears)—the manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” In this revelatory volume, Shikeith redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a Queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy. Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous contribution of 7G Foundation.

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On Contested Terrain is published on the occasion of the first comprehensive exhibition of An-My Lê’s work, organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art. Throughout her career, Lê has photographed sites of former battlefields, spaces reserved for training for or reenacting war, and the noncombatant roles of active service members. She is part of a lineage of photographers who have adapted the conventions of landscape photography to address the human traces of history and conflict, but is one of the few who have experienced the sights and sounds associated with growing up in a warzone.The publication includes selections from Viêt Nam (1994–98), a series made on Lê’s return, twenty years after her family was evacuated by the US military and 29 Palms (2003–4), made on the eponymous military base built as a training ground during the Iraq War. It will also include many new and never-before-published images. Texts by curators Dan Leers and Lisa Sutcliffe and an interview between Lê and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, address how Lê’s work complicates the landscapes of conflict that have long informed American identity.

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The San Quentin Project collects a largely unseen visual record of daily life inside one of America’s oldest and largest prisons, demonstrating how this archive of the state is now being used to teach visual literacy and process the experience of incarceration. In 2011, Nigel Poor—artist, educator, and cocreator of the acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle—began teaching a history of photography class through the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. Neither books nor cameras were allowed into the facility, so an unorthodox course with a range of inventivemapping exercises ensued: students crafted “verbal photographs” of memories for which they had no visual documentation, and annotated iconic images from different artists. After the first semester, Poor says, “one student told me he could now see fascination everywhere in San Quentin.” When Poor received access to thousands of negatives in the prison’s archive, made by corrections officers of a former era, these images of San Quentin’s everyday occurrences soon became launchpads for her students’ keen observations. From the banal to the brutal, to distinct moments of respite, the pictures in this archive gave those who were involved in the project the opportunity to share their stories and reflections on incarceration.

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Through Positive Eyes is a collaborative photo-storytelling project by 130 people living with HIV and AIDS around the world. This global photographic collaboration with Gideon Mendel and the UCLA Art & Global Health Center chronicles a very particular moment in the epidemic, when effective treatment is available but far from universal, and the enduring stigma associated with HIV and AIDS has become entrenched. Through Positive Eyes addresses this stigma, social inequality, and limited access to medication through the voices of those experiencing it. The participants in the project have volunteered to tell their stories and create their own artistic statements, empowering themselves in order to banish stigma.

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Now available in a new paperback edition, Richard Renaldi’s Touching Strangers embodies the human desire to connect despite our differences. Renaldi directed strangers to pose in front of a large-format, 8-by-10-inch view camera in towns and cities all over the United States. These startlingly intimate portraits reveal “humanity as it could be as most of us wish it would be and as it was, at least for those one fleeting moments in time.” These relationships may have only lasted for one moment, but the resulting photographs are moving and provocative, and continue to raise profound questions about the possibilities for breaking down social barriers with positive human connection in a diverse society.

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Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness includes one hundred self-portraits created by one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. In each of the images, Muholi drafts material props from her immediate environment in an effort to reflect her journey, explore her own image and possibilities as a black woman in today’s global society, and — most important — to speak emphatically in response to contemporary and historical rascisms. As she states, “I am producing this photographic document to encourage people to be brave enough to occupy spaces, brave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to re-think what history is all about, to re-claim it for ourselves, to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” More than twenty curators, poets, and authors offer written contributions that draw out the layers of meaning and possible readings to accompany select images. Powerfully arresting, this collection is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.

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An economic and cultural revolution has shaken the photobook world in the last five years: self-publishing. An army of photographers operating as publishers have had an instrumental role in today’s photobook renaissance. This book offers a do-it-yourself manual and a survey of key examples of self-published success stories, as well as a self-publishing manifesto and list of resources. The manual portion of this volume offers insight, advice, and rudimentary how-tos for the photographer interested in self-publishing. The survey offers an overview of the contemporary self-publishing landscape and includes a contribution by the Museum of Modern Art’s art librarian and bibliographer David Senior, which grounds today’s activities in a legacy of artists’ books and collectives. The case studies themselves will each illustrate a particular theme and genre of self-publishing (such as diary, documentary, or conceptual object), and will be accompanied by personal testimonies from the artists who created them. Author Bruno Ceschel, founder of the Self Publish, Be Happy organization, provides a rallying cry for all those involved in the contemporary photobook revolution—a moment in which the photobook, in all its infinitesimal manifestations, has never before been so omnipresent in our cultural landscape, nor so critical to the photographer’s practice. Self Publish, Be Happy, founded by Bruno Ceschel in 2010, collects, studies, and celebrates self-published photobooks through an ongoing program of workshops, live events, and on/ offline projects. Its London-based collection contains more than two thousand publications. Self Publish, Be Happy is the physical manifestation of a worldwide online community formed of a new, ever-evolving generation of young artists, who experiment, stretch, and play with the medium of photography.

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Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In , the first book by this rising artist, presents work from Silsila , a video and photographic installation that premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, as well as other series. Alshaibi’s lyrical multimedia work explores the landscape of conflict: the ongo - ing competition for land, resources, and power in the Middle East, and the internal battle for control between fear and fearlessness. Additional material, selected from the artist’s series Negative’s Capable Hands, Collapse, and Thowra, is presented in the context of Silsila , meaning “chain” or “link” in Arabic. The artist uses the desert, borders, and the body as over - arching symbols of the geopolitical and environmental issues and histories, linking the Arab- speaking world. Alshaibi operates between the United States, western Asia, and North Africa. Much of her work is inspired by and shot onsite in distinct natural landscapes, from the Western Sahara of North Africa to the eastern Arabian Desert on the edges of Iraq—highlighting the jarring contrast between desert and fertile oasis. Alshaibi is often a protagonist in the work, taking on the guise of distinct yet interrelated characters. Edited by Isabella Ellaheh Hughes, a writer and curator based in Abu Dhabi and Honolulu, this book includes an interview between Hughes and Alshaibi, a foreword by Salwa Mikdadi, and an essay by Alfredo Cramerotti.

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This deluxe, oversized monograph offers the most comprehensive collection of Richard Learoyd’s color studio images to date—mostly portraits, but also including a handful of exquisite still lifes. The color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura, literally translated from Latin as “dark room.” Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the Cibachrome photographic paper is exposed. The subject is in the adjacent room, separated by a lens. Light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative. The result is an entirely grainless image. The overall sense of these larger-than-life images redefines the photographic illusion. Learoyd’s subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, recreating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives— not without a small acknowledgment to the paintings of the Dutch Masters. The 150 images in this volume have been reproduced with utmost care to capture the luminosity of the original materials. Includes an artist statement by Learoyd and curatorial statement by Martin Barnes, who is organizing the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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An-My Lê’s first publication, Small Wars, brought together three bodies of black-and-white work (Vietnam, Small Wars, and 29 Palms), offering a trilogy of tautly rendered examinations of the spectacle of war, memory, and landscape. With Events Ashore, Lê continues her exploration of the American military, a pursuit both personal and civic. With this body of work, however, Lê emerges as a master colorist, employing the large-format color negative to powerful effect to capture the sometimes surreal, often surprisingly beautiful vistas of the military at work, with an emphasis on descriptive and compositional precision and subtlety of palette. Events Ashore began when the artist was invited to photograph U.S. naval ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, the first in a series of visits to battleships, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic. As Lê explains, these trips allowed her to study close at hand the military’s non-combat activities, becoming “a launching point for an examination of the U.S. military on the global stage across oceans and borders as a symbol of conflict, an echo of the age of exploration, and an unlikely (and unsung) force in the unfolding environmental crisis. . . . This work is as much about my perspective, and personal history as a political refugee from Vietnam, as it is about the vast geopolitical forces and conflicts that shape these landscapes.”

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In Photography After Frank, former New York Times writer and picture editor Philip Gefter presents the tale of contemporary photography, starting with a pivotal moment: Robert Frank’s seminal work in the 1950s. Along the way, he connects the dots of photography’s transformation into what it is today. Gefter begins with Frank’s challenge to the notion of photography’s objectivity with the grainy, off-handed spontaneity of The Americans. Next comes the “staged document” and postmodernism’s further challenge to image fidelity. Other themes are photojournalism, the diversity of portraiture, the influence of private and corporate collections on curatorial decisions, and how the market shapes art making. Throughout the book, Gefter deftly connects Frank’s legacy with the work of dozens of important individual artists who followed in his wake, from Lee Friedlander and Nan Goldin to Stephen Shore and Ryan McGinley. The book includes texts written exclusively for this publication as well as essays drawn from Gefter’s critical writings, reviews, and even obituaries. Photography After Frank offers a page-turning yet journalistic approach bound to appeal to students and artworld aficionados, alike.

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“Montgomery’s photographs capture the reality of Americans in crisis, in all our flawed, tragic, ridiculous glory.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler DynastyAmerican Mirror is award-winning photographer Philip Montgomery’s dramatic chronicle of the United States at a time of profound change. Through his intimate and powerful reporting and a signature black-and-white style, Montgomery reveals the fault lines in American society, from police violence and the opioid addiction crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and the demonstrations in support of Black lives. Yet in his unflinching images, we also see moments of grace and sacrifice, glimmers of solidarity and tireless advocates for democracy. Like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans before him, Montgomery has made an unforgettable testament of a nation at a crossroads.

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya presents the work of one of the most prominent, up-and-coming photographers working today. Sepuya primarily makes studio photographs of friends, artists, collaborators, and himself, inviting viewers to consider the construction of subjectivity. He challenges and deconstructs traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, mirror imagery, and the perspective of a black, queer gaze. In contrast to the slick artifice of contemporary portraiture, Sepuya suggests the human element of picture taking—fingerprints, smudges, dust on the surface of mirrors. He also allows glimpses into the studio setting—including tripods, backdrops, lenses, and the photographer himself—encouraging multivalent narrative reads of each image. For Sepuya, photography is a tactile and communal enterprise. Although the creation of artist books has been a long-standing part of his practice, Paul Mpagi Sepuya is the first publication of his work to be released widely, copublished with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of a major solo exhibition.

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This project presents a unique collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and composer and performer Guillermo Galindo. Misrach has been photographing the twothousand- mile border between the U.S. and Mexico since 2004, with increased focus since 2009—the latest installation in his ongoing series Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it. Misrach and Galindo have been working together to create pieces that both document and transform the artifacts of migration. Using water bottles, clothing, backpacks, Border Patrol “drag tires,” spent shotgun shells, ladders, and sections of the border wall itself, most of which were collected by Misrach, Galindo fashions instruments to be performed as unique sound-generating devices. He also imagines graphic musical scores, many of which also use Misrach’s photographs as points of departure. A unique melding of the artist as documentarian and interpreter, the book will include several suites of photographs drawn from a number of distinct series, or Cantos—some made with a large-format camera as well as an iPhone. The book will also contain a compilation of two dozen sculpture-instruments, graphic scores, instrument designs, and links to videos of performances by Galindo on the image-inspired instruments.

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A Wild Life is Michael “Nick” Nichols’s story, told with passion and insight by author and photo-editor Melissa Harris. Nichols’ story combines a life of adventure, with a conviction about how we can redeem the human race by protecting our wildlife. The book’s two central characters are the photographer - who journeys from the American South, via the photographers’ co-operative Magnum, to becoming lead wildlife photographer of National Geographic magazine – and the author, who travels with the photographer on assignment in Africa, to gain intimate and deep insight into her subject. Harris’s story also draws on meetings with some of the world’s leading eco-scientists – including legendary primatologist, Jane Goodall.

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Robert Adams, one of America's foremost living photographers, has spent decades considering and documenting the landscape of the American West and the ways it has been altered, disturbed, or destroyed by the hand of man. A professor of English before turning to photography, Adams is also a skilled writer and acute thinker on aesthetic questions. Aperture's previous bestselling collections of his essays, Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph, assembled his thoughts on a range of subjects, including writing, teaching, photography's place in the arts and a host of fellow photographers. Along Some Rivers collects Adams's correspondence and conversations—some of which have never been published before—with writers and curators including William McEwan, Constance Sullivan and Thomas Weski. In so doing, it provides another point of entry, offering a portrait of the artist in debate and elucidating his thoughts on a number of his now legendary projects, including Cottonwoods and What We Bought. Adams also expounds on why, in his view, Marcel Duchamp has not been a helpful guide for art, and he discusses which filmmakers and painters have influenced him, which cameras he prefers and how he approaches printing his pictures. Along Some Rivers also includes a selection of 28 unpublished landscapes.

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In 1975, fresh out of art school, Martin Parr found poor footing in the London photography scene, so he moved to the picturesque Yorkshire Pennine mill town of Hebden Bridge. Over a period of five years, he documented the town in photographs, showing in particular the aspects of traditional life that were beginning to decline. Susie Parr, whom he had met in Manchester, joined him in documenting a year in the life of a small Methodist chapel, together with its farming community. Such chapels seemed to encapsulate the region’s disappearing way of life. Here Martin Parr found his photographic voice, while together he and Susie assembled a remarkable and touching historic document—now published in book form for the first time. The Non-Conformists takes its title from the Methodist and Baptist chapels that then char - acterized this area of Yorkshire and defined the fiercely independent character of the town. In words and pictures, the Parrs vividly and affectionately document cobbled streets, flat-capped mill workers, hardy gamekeepers, henpecked husbands, and jovial shop owners. The best Parr photographs are interleaved with Susie Parr’s detailed background descriptions of the society they observed.

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind a single, expansive body of work at a pivotal moment in his career.Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. This volume unpacks his Dark Room series (2016-21), offering a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. The excavation and mapping of intellectual and artistic data points across the artist’s work is presented through three distinct “voices,” allowing for a comprehensive cross-referencing of conceptual categories. Each category is alphabetized and illuminated via new texts by curator and scholar Gökcan Demirkazik; selections from previously published texts about the work by critics, colleagues, and friends; quotations of other writers’ wo

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Working with ordinary people who answered ads in local papers, posing them in their nondescript homes or unexceptional landscapes and using relatively simple equipment, Katy Grannan alchemizes these factors into extraordinary photographs. Disarming for their directness and for the provocative but casual nudity on display, her pictures capture the spirit of her subjects in the manner of Diane Arbus, but they also draw upon the artificial, posed tableaux of Gregory Crewdson and, indeed, art history. The posture of the tattooed and tanned (and nude) figure in "Mike," a 2003 portrait which appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, resembles nothing so much as the awkward repose of the desert nomad in Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy." In this first monograph, over half of the photographs are previously unpublished, providing a fresh depth to our understanding of this already widely known and accomplished young artist. Sitting on a dirt road in a knit bikini, standing defiantly in a corner of a cheaply paneled living room, leaning languidly against a chain-link fence, Grannan's photoraphs convey the dark side that we all have as well as the need to be recognized as unique individuals.

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Olivia Bee is celebrated for her dreamy, evocative portraits and landscapes rich with implied narratives of intimacy, freedom, and adventure. Olivia Bee: Kids in Love showcases two bodies of photographic work, including the series, Enveloped in a Dream, that first brought Bee recognition as a teenager. This first series offers a visual diary of girlhood friendship and the exploration of self, showcasing Bee’s unique ability to convey the bittersweet nostalgia of adolescence on the brink of adulthood and new possibilities. The second set of images, Kids in Love, is drawn from recent work and continues Bee’s photographic chronicle of her circle of friends and new loves, capturing both the pleasures and terrors of the fleeting passage of romanticized youth. While the work continues to evolve, what remains constant is her seductive use of color and photographic artifact, as well as the immediacy and charge of each image. Bee gives voice to the self-awareness and visual fluency of the millennial generation. Experiences are sharply felt, and easily communicated and shared, generating visual records that render these memories as significant as the moments themselves. Tavi Gevinson, founding editor of the online magazine Rookie and Bee’s frequent collaborator and model, writes about the work and about the role of images as social currency in today’s image-driven world.

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Author and technologist Nicholas Negroponte has declared that printed books are in danger of disappearing; according to his predictions, the last printed book will appear sometime in the spring of 2016. This copy might well make its appearance tucked away in a backpack and taken aboard a subway to read. This is the premise of The Last Book, the latest body of work by Amsterdam-based photographer Reinier Gerritsen. The world—and the word—is in the process of becoming less and less dependent on paper. Our reading habits, especially as they occur in public spaces, are subtly shifting each day. Gerritsen has taken up the current plethora of books and their readers on New York City’s subways as the proverbial canary-inthe- coal-mine, an indicator of the still-robust nature of public readership, in the face of its ostensible decline. The work began for Gerritsen as a series of modest observations, and has turned into a series of unexpected, documentary portraits, set against a visual landscape of best sellers, classics, romance novels, detective thrillers, Bibles, biographies, and other printed books. Gerritsen depicts groups of individuals engrossed in the worlds they hold in their hands, bringing together a social portrait of readers. From the subtle interactions of passengers and facial expressions to the sociological clues of book titles, a complexly layered narrative is informed by the choices of readers and the mélange of New York City’s subway riders as they are transported both literally and figuratively, by the books in their hands. The Last Book will also include an illustrated index and bibliography charting the titles and authors that populate our minds during our daily commutes.

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Photography Is Magic draws together current ideas about the use of photography as an invaluable medium in the contemporary art world. Edited and with an essay by Charlotte Cotton, this critical publication surveys over eighty artists, all of whom are engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice, as the contemporary landscape is currently being reshaped through digital techniques. We are shown the scope of photographic possibilities in the context of the contemporary creative process. From Michele Abeles and Walead Beshty to Daniel Gordon and Matt Lipps, Cotton has selected artists who are consciously reframing photographic practices using mixed media, appropriation, and a recalibration of analog processes. Photography Is Magic provides the reader with an engaging physical experience and is designed for younger photo aficionados, students, and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of contemporary photography.

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Pictures for Charis offers a groundbreaking new work by artist Kelli Connell, synthesizing text and image, while raising vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.  Pictures for Charis is a project driven by photographer Kelli Connell’s obsession with the writer Charis Wilson, Edward Weston’s partner, model, and collaborator during one of the most productive segments of his historic career. Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locales where the latter couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. Wilson wrote extensively about her travels and about her, and Weston’s, photographic concerns. In chasing Charis Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, one that finds a kinship with Wilson and, to her surprise, Weston, too, as she navigates her own life and struggles as an artist against a

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Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation is the powerful and celebratory visual record of a contemporary activist movement in New York City, and a moving testament to the enduring power of photography in activism, advocacy, and community. In June 2020, after a Black trans woman in Missouri and a Black trans man in Florida were killed just weeks apart, activists Qween Jean and Joela Rivera returned to the historic Stonewall Inn—site of the 1969 riots that launched the modern gay rights movement—where they initiated weekly actions known thereafter as the Stonewall Protests. Brought together by the urgent need to center Black trans and queer lives within the Black Lives Matter movement, a vibrant and radical community emerged. Over the following year, the Stonewall Protests brought together thousands of people across communities and social movements to gather in solidarity, resistance, and communion. Each Thursday was an invitation for protests, healing, and celebration—whether through marches, voguing balls, or vigil—and a living testament to love in revolution. This book gathers twenty-four photographers who participated in these actions to share images and words on the demonstrations and their community at large, preserving this legacy as it unfolded. Through photographs, interviews, and text, Revolution Is Love celebrates the power of shared joy and struggle in trans community and liberation. Featuring images and text by Ramie Ahmed, Lucy Baptiste, Budi, Brandon English, Deb Fong, Snake Garcia, Stas Ginzburg, Katie Godowski, Robert Hamada, Chae Kihn, Zak Krevitt, Erica Lansner, Daniel Lehrhaupt, Caroline Mardok, Ryan McGinley, Josh Pacheco, Jarrett Robertson, Phoenix Robles, Souls of a Movement, Madison Swart, Cindy Trinh, Sean Waltrous, Ruvan Wijesooriya, and David Zung

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