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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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 this volume of The Photography Workshop Series, Graciela Iturbide—known for her portraits and landscapes imbued with poetic ambiguity and documentary truth—explores photographing in ways that employ a deeply personal vision, while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds. Aperture Foundation works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, Iturbide shares her creative process and artistic inspirations, and discusses a wide range of issues, from portraying spirituality in photographs and engaging with different cultures to the importance of curiosity.

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In the sixth installment of The Photography Workshop Series, Richard Misrach—well known for sublime and expansive landscapes that focus on the relationship between humans and their environment—offers his insight into creating photographs that are visually beautiful and contain cultural implications. Aperture Foundation works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, in this volume Misrach shares his own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from the language of color photography and the play of light and atmosphere, to transcending place and time through metaphor, myth, and abstraction.

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Aperture is pleased to present five of the most promising photographers featured on tinyvices.com, the popular online gallery founded by independent curator and photographer Tim Barber. Presented in five separate volumes, and limited to one thousand copies per edition, the series reflects the loose spirit of the website, and offers a range of styles and approaches to photography—Kenneth Cappello’s casual snapshots of the skate scene of his youth, Allan Macintyre’s rigorous investigations of geological activity, Jason Nocito’s playful groupings of disparate images, Robin Schwartz’s disquieting portraits of her daughter, Jaimie Warren’s theatrical self-portraits. Each book will be introduced by a prominent artist, writer, or curator. Since its inception in 2005, tinyvices has become an influential platform for emerging and underexposed talent, featuring the work of hundreds of photographers and artists, including Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow. Its corresponding exhibition opened in New York in 2006, and has since toured worldwide, from Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City to Colette in Paris.

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In this series, Aperture Foundation works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, internationally acclaimed color photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, offer their expert insight into street photography and the poetic image. Through words and photographs—their own and others’—they invite the reader into the heart of their artistic processes. They share their thoughts about a wide range of practical and philosophical issues, from questions about seeing and being in the world with a camera, to how to shape a complete body of work in a way that’s both structured and intuitive.

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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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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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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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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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Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen have been working together since 2007 to tell the story of Sochi, Russia, site of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. They returned repeatedly to this region as committed practitioners of “slow journalism,” establishing a solid foundation of research on and engagement with this small yet incredibly complicated place before it found itself in the glare of international media attention. As Van Bruggen writes, “Never before have the Olympic Games been held in a region that contrasts more strongly with the glamour of the event than Sochi. Just twenty kilometers away is the conflict zone Abkhazia. To the east the Caucasus Mountains stretch into obscure and impoverished republics such as North Ossetia and Chechnya. On the coast, old Soviet-era sanatoria stand shoulder to shoulder with the most expensive hotels and clubs of the Russian Riviera. By 2014 the area around Sochi will have been changed beyond recognition.” Hornstra’s photographic approach combines the best of documentary storytelling with contemporary portraiture, found photographs, and other visual elements collected over the course of their travels. The Sochi Project was released via installments in book form and online, each focusing on a particular facet of the story, the geography, the people, and their history. The highlights and key elements of this extensive effort were brought together for the first time in this volume, first released in 2013 and designed by Kummer & Herrman, who have been integral to the collaboration from the outset. Now, Aperture is pleased to issue this in-demand book in a more affordably priced edition, in a slightly smaller trim size. The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus offers alternative perspectives and in-depth reporting on this remarkable region, the site of the most expensive Olympic Games ever, and one that sits at the combustible crossroads of war, tourism, and history.

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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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