Search results for ""aperture""

Bruce Davidson is a pioneer of social documentary photography. He began taking photographs at the age of ten and continued to develop his passion at Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. Later called upon for military service, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson in France and was introduced to Magnum Photos. In his work, Davidson prizes his relationship to the subject above all else. From his profound documentation of the civil rights movement to his in-depth study of one derelict block in Harlem, he has immersed himself fully in his projects, which have sometimes taken him several years to complete. He once wrote, “I often find myself an outsider on the inside, discovering beauty and meaning in the most desperate of situations.” This survey, created in conjunction with an exhibition at Fundación Mapfre in Spain, focuses on the work that has made Davidson one of the most influential documentary photographers to this day. In addition to his civil rights series and his work in Harlem, the book includes Davidson’s well-known series Brooklyn Gang, Subway, and Central Park. The book also highlights more recent projects, such as his explorations of Paris and Los Angeles landscapes.

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A culmination of four years of photographing throughout Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, Sawdust Mountain focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support. Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Eirik Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future—no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old-growth forests. Johnson, a Seattle native, describes his photographs as “a melancholy love letter of sorts, my own personal ramblings.” Through this poetic approach, Sawdust Mountain records a region affected by historic economic complexities and, by extension, one aspect of our fraught relationship with the environment in the twenty-first century.

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A searing, diaristic portrayal of a city and society in revolution by Magnum nominee Myriam Boulos In her debut monograph, Myriam Boulos casts an unflinching eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. She portrays her friends and family with startling energy and intimacy, in states of pleasure and protest. Boulos renders the body in public space as a powerful motif, both visceral and vulnerable in the face of state neglect and violence. Of her approach to photography, Boulos states: “It’s more of a need than a choice. I obsess about things and I don’t know how to deal with these obsessions in any other way but photography.” Featuring a contextual essay by noted writer Mona Eltahawy, What’s Ours showcases Boulos’s strident and urgent vision.

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Overpass is about what it means to move through the landscape. Walking along a vast network of centuries-old footpaths through the English countryside, artist Sam Contis focuses on stiles, the simple structures that offer a means of passage over walls and fences and allow public access through privately owned land. In her immersive sequences of black-and-white photographs, they become repeating sculptural forms in the landscape, invitations to free movement on one hand and a reminder of the history of enclosure on the other. Made from wood and stone, each unique, they appear as markers pointing the way forward, or decaying and half-hidden by the undergrowth. An essay by writer Daisy Hildyard contextualizes this body of work within histories of the British landscape and contemporary ecological discourses. In an age of rising nationalism and a renewed insistence on borders, Overpass invites us to reflect on how we cross boundaries, who owns space, and the ways we have shaped the natural environment and how we might shape it in the future.

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To celebrate the centennial of America’s National Park Service, Picturing America’s National Parks brings together some of the finest landscape photography in the history of the medium, from America’s most magnificent and sacred environments. Photography has played an integral role in both the formation of the National Parks and in the depiction of America itself, through this natural resource. From Yosemite to the most recent 2013 addition of Pinnacles National Park in California, America’s National Parks have been enjoyed through photographs for over 150 years. This book traces that his - tory and delights readers with stunning photographs of the best American landscapes. An informative essay from curator Jamie M. Allen unfolds the role of photography in promoting America’s national heritage, land conservation, and wildlife preservation. Featuring the historic work of masters such as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, William Henry Jackson, Edward Weston, and Minor White, as well as contemporary greats such as Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, this volume offers a powerful look at America’s National Parks and pays homage to a practice that has defined the way we see America, particularly the American West.

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The extraordinary experiences of ordinary people—their suffering and their unimaginable bravery—are the subject of Judy Glickman Lauder’s remarkable photographs. Beyond the Shadows responds to the world’s looking the other way as the Nazis took power and their hate-fueled nationalism steadily turned to mass murder. In the context of the horror of the Holocaust, it also tells the uplifting story of how the citizens and leadership of Denmark, under occupation and at tremendous risk to themselves, defied the Third Reich to transport the country’s Jews to safety in Sweden. Over the past thirty years, Glickman Lauder has captured the intensity of death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, in dark and expressive photographs, telling of a world turned upside down, and, in contrast, the redemptive and uplifting story of the “Danish exception.” Including texts by Holocaust scholars Michael Berenbaum and Judith S. Goldstein, and a previously unpublished original text by survivor Elie Wiesel, Beyond the Shadows demonstrates passionately what hate can lead to, and what can be done to stand in its path. “This is photography and storytelling for our times, about what hate leads to, and how we can stand up to it. Beyond the Shadows is powerful and revealing, and sharply relevant to all of us who believe in the human family.” — Sir Elton John

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Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal presents a survey of the artist’s prolific and extraordinary interdisciplinary career, with a particular focus on the work’s relationship to the photographic image and to issues of representation and perception. At the core of Hank Willis Thomas’s practice, is his ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprises American culture, and to do so with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity. Other powerful themes include the commodification of identity through popular media, sports, and advertising. In the ten years since his first publication, Pitch Blackness , Thomas has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary art, equally at home with collaborative, trans-media projects such as Question Bridge, Philly Block, and For Freedoms as he is with high-profile, international solo exhibitions. This extensive presentation of his work contextualizes the material with incisive essays from Portland Art Museum curators Julia Dolan and Sara Krajewski and art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and an in-depth interview between Dr. Kellie Jones and the artist that elaborates on Thomas’s influences and inspirations.

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Looking Again is as much about photography as it is about the specific photographs reproduced within it. It is designed to provide the reader with a glimpse into both the collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art and into photography’s complexity. Through 132 objects and essays, Russell Lord explores the many histories of photography, addressing long-held beliefs and offering new ways of thinking about, and looking at, photographs. As the world moves increasingly toward an image-dependent style of communication, there has never been a better time to seriously examine our belief in or apprehension toward the photographic image. Standing on the threshold of what might be a turning point in humanity’s relationship to the photograph, this volume encourages the reader to dig deeply into photography: to look, and then look again. This book is published on the centennial of the first photography exhibition presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art, in 1918.

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Photography and Pop-culture buffs, get out your crayons and colored pencils! Martin Parr’s colorful and tongue-in-cheek photographs—his comedy of contemporary manners—have been transformed into a coloring book. Here is Parr’s affectionate and hilarious catalogue of human foibles—our bad fashion choices, messy foods, trashy souvenirs and the tourists who buy them, and all the often-overlooked silly details of our daily life—rendered afresh. The book’s eighty pages are packed with the most iconic and beloved Parr images, made into original drawings by Jane Mount, offering hours of coloring entertainment, as well as Parr’s witty take on the coloring book craze. Be inspired to create a new version of a classic Parr—sunbathers in Speedos, tea-drinkers and rainbow cakes, socks with sandals—and in the process, experience his vision in a new way. A riotous take on the eccentricities and peculiarities of today’s world, for all fans of Parr’s work, and an original contribution to the coloring genre!

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This Is Mars offers a thrilling visual experience of the surface of the red planet. The multi-award-winning French editor and designer Xavier Barral has chosen and composed photographic frames, drawn from the comprehensive photographic map of Mars made by the U.S. observation satellite MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), to revel in the wonder of Mars. What Yann Arthus-Bertrand did with a light aircraft for The Earth from the Air , Barral does for Mars—by scouring tens of thousands of gigabytes of satellite photographs available from NASA, seeking out the most distinct images of the planet’s surface. The result is visionary—a great science book, a unique artist’s book, and a stunning object. The photographs are accompanied by an introduction from research scientist Alfred S. McEwen, principle investigator of the HiRISE telescope; an essay by astrophysicist Francis Rocard, who explains the story of Mars’s origins and its evolution; and a timeline by geophysicist Nicolas Mangold, who demystifies some of Mars’s geological history. Now available as a mid-sized, accessibly priced edition, This Is Mars will excite lovers of great photobooks, and everyone curious about the universe and beyond.

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Suits that pop with loud colors and dazzling patterns, complete with a nearly ubiquitous bowtie, define the style of the new “dandy.” Described as “high-styled rebels” by author Shantrelle P. Lewis, black men with a penchant for color and refined fashion, both new and vintage, have gained popular attention in recent years, influencing mainstream fashion. But black dandyism itself is not new; originating in Enlightenment England’s slave culture, it has continued for generations in black cultures around the world. Now, set against the backdrop of hip-hop culture, this iteration of dandies is redefining what it means to be black, masculine, and fashionable. Dandy Lion presents and celebrates individual dandy personalities, designers and tailors, movements and events that define contemporary dandyism. Throughout the book, self-expression is communicated through personal style, clothing, shoes, hats, and swagger. Lewis’s carefully curated selection of contemporary photographs surveys the movement across the globe in spectacular form, with all of the vibrant patterns, electrifying colors, and fanciful poses of this brilliant style subculture.

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British photographer Edmund Clark and counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black have assembled photographs and documents that confront the nature of contemporary warfare and the invisible mechanisms of state control. From George W. Bush’s 2001 declaration of the “war on terror” until 2008, an unknown number of people disappeared into a network of secret prisons organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—transfers without legal process known as extraordinary renditions. No public records were kept as detainees were shuttled all over the globe. Some were eventually sent to Guantánamo Bay or released without charge, while others remain unaccounted for. The paper trail assembled in this volume shows these activities via the weak points of business accountability: invoices, documents of incorporation, and billing reconciliations produced by the small-town American businesses enlisted in detainee transportation. Clark has traveled worldwide to photograph former detention sites, detainees’ homes, and government locations. He and Black recreate the network that links CIA “black sites,” and evoke ideas of opacity, surface, and testimony in relation to this process—a system hidden in plain sight. Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, copublished with the Magnum Foundation, its creation supported by Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund, raises fundamental questions about the accountability and complicity of our governments, and the erosion of our most basic civil rights.

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This Is Mars offers a previously unseen vision of the red planet. Located somewhere between art and science, the book brings together for the first time a series of panoramic images recently sent back by the U.S. observation satellite MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Since its arrival in orbit in 2006, MRO and its HiRISE telescope have been mapping Mars’s surface in a series of exceptionally detailed images that reveal all the beauty of this legendary planet. Each image presents a six-kilometer-wide zone in which the planet’s geography and its geological and mineralogical textures are revealed. Conceived as a visual atlas, the book takes the reader on a fantastic voyage—plummeting into the breathtaking depths of the Velles Marineris canyons; floating over the black dunes of Noachis Terra; and soaring to the highest peak in our solar system, the Olympus Mons volcano. The search for traces of water also uncovers vast stretches of carbonic ice at the planet’s poles. Seamlessly compiled by French publisher, designer, and editor Xavier Barral, these extraordinary images are accompanied by an introduction by research scientist Alfred S. McEwen, principle investigator on the HiRISE telescope; an essay by astrophysicist Francis Rocard, who explains the story of Mars’s origins and its evolution; and a timeline by geophysicist Nicolas Mangold, who unveils geological secrets of this fascinating planet.

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For the past fifteen years, Dawoud Bey has been making striking, large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Depicting teenagers from a wide economic, social, and ethnic spectrum— and intensely attentive to their poses and gestures—he has created a highly diverse group portrait of a generation that intentionally challenges teenage stereotypes. Bey spends two to three weeks in each school, taking formal portraits of individual students, each made in a classroom during one forty-five-minute period. At the start of the sitting, each subject writes a brief autobiographical statement. By turns poignant, funny, or harrowing, these revealing words are an integral part of the project, and the subject’s statement accompanies each photograph in the book. Together, the words and images in Class Pictures offer unusually respectful and perceptive portraits that establish Dawoud Bey as one of the best portraitists at work today.

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A landmark in the history of modern art, People of the 20th Century presents the fullest expression of the German photographer August Sander’s lifelong work: a monumental endeavor to amass an archive of twentieth-century humanity through a cross section of German culture. Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life, capturing bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families, to create a catalog of the German people, arranged by their profession, gender, and social status. First imagined in the 1920s, he pursued the project for more than fifty years during a politically charged and rapidly changing time, fraught by two world wars and the devastating repercussions of Nazism. Sander never finished the seven-volume, forty-nine portfolio magnum opus, continually refining and shaping it to convey an understanding of the world in which he lived. The photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the wars and form one of the most influential achievements of the twentieth century. Now made available again, People of the 20th Century brings together the exquisite reproductions and principal texts of the long out-of-print, seven-volume edition, as well as the main scholarship from the accompanying study edition. This all-in-one edition, with 619 photographs, offers the most comprehensive iteration of Sander’s still-essential vision.

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In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The featuring of the Black figure and Black runway and cover models in the media and art has been one marker of increasingly inclusive fashion and art communities. More critically, however, the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body has been reinfused with new vitality and substance thanks to an increase in powerful images authored by an international community of Black photographers. In a richly illustrated essay, Sargent opens up the conversation around the role of the Black body in the marketplace; the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image; and the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers participating more fully in the fashion (and art) industries. Fifteen artist portfolios feature the brightest contemporary fashion photographers, including Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer hired to shoot a cover story for American Vogue; Campbell Addy, founder of the Nii Agency and journal; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title, The Misrepresentation of Representation, says it all. Alongside a series of conversations between generations, their images and stories chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial Black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.

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Newly revised histories of photography as recorded via the photobook have added enormously to our understanding of the medium’s culture, particularly in places that are often marginalized, such as Latin America and Africa. However, until now, only a handful of Chinese books have made it onto historians’ short lists. Yet China has a fascinating history of photobook publishing, and The Chinese Photobook reveals for the first time the richness and diversity of this heritage. This now available in a smaller size, more accessibly priced hardcover edition, volume is based on a collection compiled by Martin Parr and Beijing- and London-based Dutch photographer team WassinkLundgren. And while the collection was inspired initially by Parr’s interest in propaganda books and in finding key works of socialist realist photography from the early days of the Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution era, the selection of books includes key volumes published as early as 1900, as well as contemporary volumes by emerging Chinese photographers.

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Other Americas, originally published in France in 1986 and designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado, is Sebastião Salgado’s first book. Upon publication it became an award-winning photobook classic, establishing Salgado’s reputation as the visionary reportage photographer of his generation. With forty-nine black-and-white photographs taken between 1977 and 1984, Salgado’s distilled survey of a continent includes images from Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. The images range in subject, capturing spiritual and religious practices, changing rural landscapes, and intimate domestic life. Each photograph shares a sense of sincere connection—connection between the subject and the photographer, between a population and their homeland, and between Salgado and the audience he seeks to engage. In his text, Alan Riding writes, “Salgado has sought out a lost corner of the Americas and he has made it a prism through which the entire continent can be viewed. A philosophy of life is caught in a look; an entire way of life is frozen in a moment . . .”

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James Mollison’s photo projects are defined by smart, original concepts applied to serious social and environmental themes. For his latest book, Playground, Mollison photographs children at play in their school playgrounds, inspired by memories of his own childhood and interested in how we all learn to negotiate relationships and our place in the world through play. For each picture, Mollison sets up his camera during school break time, making multiple frames and then composing each final photograph from several scenes, in which he finds revealing “play” narratives. With photographs from rich and poor schools, in countries including Argentina, Bhutan, Bolivia, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Norway, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., Mollison also provides access for readers of all ages to issues of global diversity and inequality.

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The best way to learn is by doing. The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals. Whether you’re looking for exercises to improve your craft—alone or in a group—or you’re interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with photographic process. Inside you will find advice for better shooting and editing, creative ways to start new projects, games and activities, and insight into the practices of those responsible for our most iconic photographs—John Baldessari, Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jim Goldberg, Miranda July, Susan Meiselas, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Tim Walker, and many more. The book also features a Polaroid alphabet by Mike Slack, which divides each chapter, and a handy subject guide. Edited by acclaimed photographers Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, the assignments and project ideas in this book are indispensable for teachers and students, and great fun for everyone fascinated by taking pictures.

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Penelope Umbrico (Photographs)offers a radical reinterpretation of every-day consumer and vernacular images. As the artist describes, she works “within the virtual world of consumer marketing and social media, traveling through the relentless flow of seductive images, objects, and information that surrounds us, searching for decisive moments— but in these worlds, decisive moments are cultural absurdities.” Umbrico finds these moments in the printed pages of consumer product mail-order catalogs, travel and leisure brochures, and online sites such as Craigslist, EBay, and Flickr. By identifying and isolating image typologies—candy-colored horizons and sunsets, books used as props—the farcical and surreal nature of the lingua franca of consumerism and recrea-tion is brought to new light. Penelope Umbrico (Photographs) presents a unique and challenging approach to quintessential issues of representation in contemporary culture, including how images are used to construct and communicate consumer desire, and whether or not the growing volume of images we view online fosters a critical visual literacy. This volume, Umbrico’s first monograph, is accompanied by a series of essays, appendices of source material, excerpts from theoretical works, and other material serving as resources for engaging further with the work and issues involved.

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A now classic text on the art, Why People Photograph gathers a selection of essays by the great master photographer Robert Adams, tackling such diverse subjects as collectors, humor, teaching, money and dogs. Adams also writes brilliantly on Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Judith Joy Ross, Susan Meiselas, Michael Schmidt, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Eugène Atget. The book closes with two essays on "working conditions" in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, and the essay "Two Landscapes." Adams writes: At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are."

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Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore’s unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series.

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David Levi Strauss is a writer whose visual and intellectual sensibilities are both acute and expansive. His trenchant writings on photography and photographers have been collected for this volume from a broad range of magazines, including Aperture, Artforum and The Nation. In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, Strauss tackles subjects as diverse as “Photography and Propaganda,” the imagery of dreams, Sebastiao Salgado's epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. The timely issue of photographic legitimacy is addressed in the essay “Photography and Belief,” and in “The Highest Degree of Illusion,” Strauss discusses the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11. As our world is shaped more and more by images and their slipperiness, what he calls a media “pandemonium” in its root meaning of “the place of all howling demons,” we need a mind and voice like Levi Strauss' to bring clarity to our vision.

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Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph by rising interdisciplinary artist Awol Erizku. Working across photography, film, video, painting, and installation, his work references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, from hip hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. This comprehensive monograph spans Erizku’s career, blending his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer working regularly for the New Yorker, New York magazine, Time, and GQ, among others, and features his conceptual portraits of Black cultural icons, such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan. As Erizku recently told the New York Times, “It’s important for me to create confident, powerful, downright regal images of Black people.” Featuring essays by critically acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, and interviews with the artist by Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent, Mystic Parallax is a luminous and arresting testament to the artist’s tremendous power and originality. Copublished by Aperture and The Momentary

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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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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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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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To ensure the ongoing availability of Diane Arbus Revelations, Aperture is proud to release this vitally important volume on the fiftieth anniversary of the posthumous 1972 Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the simultaneous publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. Revelations explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of Arbus's wholly original voice. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world. The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career. It also includes a new contribution by Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture, alongside essays by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography, emeritus, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. An extensive chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, is illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed primarily of excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounting to a kind of autobiography. An afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues, compiled by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

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Eden is the result of a project initiated under the aegis of Immersion: A French American Photography Commission, created by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and Aperture Foundation. As part of this inaugural commission, French-artist Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques purchased a small, historical schoolhouse in Eden, North Carolina, intending it as a site for the exploration of ideas of property, ownership, and imagemaking. One of his first activities was to scan the entire exterior of the house, resulting in the more than 1,000 scans reproduced in these pages. In other words, Eden contains the photographic shell of the building; the pages filled with gritty, distillate blackand- white images of the house’s foundations, walls, and crumbling facade. Woven intermittently throughout, are a handful of gatefolds that reveal elements from the project’s development, including materials that reference historical and legal documents pertaining to the house, and video and photographic documentation of Couzinet-Jacques’s experiments from the past year. Eden presents the first iteration of this long-term, ongoing project, in which Couzinet-Jacques will continue to invite other artists to create site-specific explorations of the house and to engage with the site as an incubator for creative activities—an intentional blurring of the lines between art and everyday life. In November 2016, an exhibition of this work will appear in the Aperture Gallery.

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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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