Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2021 i Aperture

Shirin Neshat In 1975, the artist Shirin Neshat left her home of Iran to attend school in California. She didn’t return to her birthplace for another fifteen years. During her time away, the Islamic Revolution and then the Iran-Iraq War shifted the country’s face past Neshat’s recognition. That cultural dislocation is the thematic heart of an exhibition of three decades of Neshat’s photography and video at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas. Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again—featuring more than two hundred of her works from her iconic early projects such as Women of Allah (1993–97) to her recent series Land of Dreams (2019)—considers themes of immigration and exile. “Her work is so important for what it says about gender and ideology and the complications…

Like many of Berenice Abbott’s iconic photographs of 1930s New York, Downtown Skyport (1936) offers a glimpse into a lost world. The gleaming biplane moored in the foreground now looks as quaint as the relics of the vanishing Gilded Age metropolis visible in some of Abbott’s other photographs—horse-drawn peddlers’ carts, rickety el stations—must have once appeared to her. This cycle of reverberating nostalgia was preordained by the title Abbott chose for the seminal collection of these images she published in 1939: Changing New York. What was then new is now old; what was then old is now gone. Change is inexorable, Abbott seemed to be saying, and her mission was to preserve a moment in the city before it passed into the slipstream of history. Abbott’s iconic photographs of 1930s…

Ten years ago, my partner, the English poet James Fenton, and I acquired a derelict corner property across from Mount Morris Park, now known as Marcus Garvey Park, at West 123rd Street. It had been built in 1890 as a family home by John Dwight, the cofounder of the Arm & Hammer baking soda company. He also built the brownstone next door two years earlier for his daughter. These were the days when the grid had been laid out and was not fully occupied. Uptown Manhattan in old photographs can bring to mind Oklahoma City in the days of the land grab, mostly empty, but staked out. Our house, designed by the architect Frank Hill Smith, supposedly the first person whom Oscar Wilde called on when he arrived in Boston,…

At the height of the racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s, Breonna Taylor’s, and Tony McDade’s deaths by law enforcement in 2020, a group of six young Black photographers organized themselves into the collective See In Black. Spearheaded by the New York–based image makers Micaiah Carter and Joshua Kissi, the mission was simple: use art to affirm that Black life, disproportionately affected by the coronavirus and state-sanctioned violence, matters beyond moments of crisis. “See In Black formed as a collective of Black photographers to dismantle white supremacy and systemic oppression,” the coalition’s statement of solidarity reads. “Our intention is to replenish those we’ve been nourished by.” Their first action was to establish a print sale titled Vol. 001 Black In America, which included snapshots, street scenes, self-portraits,…

Since last June, a group has gathered every Thursday on the sidewalk outside the Stonewall Inn, the launching place of the modern gay rights movement. As expected at gay bars, those assembled coagulate in little clots, smoking, chatting, and exchanging hugs. That this has happened during a global pandemic means that they are sporting masks. And that this is but a preamble to a rally and march, aimed at holding space for, drawing attention to, and advocating on behalf of Black trans women, means that it’s all done under decidedly different auspices than a night out on the town to pull looks and dance. “We aren’t doing anything crazy,” says Qween Jean, who alongside Joel Rivera has been organizing and leading the weekly Stonewall Protests as well as other actions…

How did you spend your time in quarantine? Mostly, I did what I always do when I’m in the house alone, which is read. The difference, obviously, is that I wasn’t leaving the house. I did read something I would have never read otherwise: a book of Cole Porter’s letters. The book is like a thousand pages. I thought, You’re never going to read a thousand-page book of Cole Porter’s letters. Who would have time for that? What did you miss about the city while you were sequestered? One of the central problems for me was food, because I hate to cook, and I mean hate. I loathe cooking. I don’t even like having to slice an apple. The food is horrible in this house. You cannot believe how terrible…

The urbanist Jane Jacobs, who famously made the case for the life of New York’s sidewalks, believed that New Yorkers are foot people. That may be why photographers, the ultimate foot people, thrive here, finding endless visual pleasure and contradiction in the city’s frenzied theater of the everyday, whether along crammed sidewalks or down below in the aging, often-delayed subway that everyone loves, and loves to loathe. New York is a town of improvisers—and there has been no shortage of creative solutions to adapting and to weathering the trauma and challenges of the pandemic. Photographers who would usually be on the street making pictures have instead been busy organizing their archives, finding new meanings in indelible images. As they rediscover previous versions of the city, their efforts underscore that the…

New York is a ghost town. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the metropolis to a standstill. Many are scared to even leave their apartments to buy groceries. The globe-trotting photographer Jamel Shabazz is tucked away in his Long Island home, his “sanctuary.” Shabazz’s world is rocked daily by yet another phone call announcing the death of a loved one. It is a calendar of loss with which he is intimately familiar. He survived the 1980s crack era and the AIDS crisis, when so many friends from his Brooklyn neighborhoods—Red Hook and then East Flatbush—did not. Every morning, while living under quarantine, Shabazz saunters into one of the several closets in his home and picks up a heavy archive box. Hundreds of identical boxes line every available space in his home.…

I didn’t move to New York until 1968, but I’d been imagining what it would be like to live here for as long as I can remember. Movies fueled my fantasies, of course, and nearly all of the novels I read (Salinger, Capote, Kerouac, The Great Gatsby, Auntie Mame), but it was magazines that really enticed me. Because all but a few of the major U.S. magazines were based in New York, the city dominated their coverage of culture and commerce. Every museum, restaurant, art gallery, theater, publisher, bookstore, hairdresser, performance space, dive bar, nightclub, discotheque, and art-house cinema, it seemed, was here somewhere. To anyone reading Esquire, Town & Country, or Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s and ’60s, New York was apparently the center of the known world: the…

In physics, redshift occurs when a heavenly body is rapidly rushing away. Adam Pape’s recent photographs, which view New York through a scrim of red and pink roses, convey a similar sensation of life receding at the very moment it is being experienced. This series, from 2017 through summer 2020, took off from a group of pictures that Pape made of rosebushes growing by a police station in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where he was living at the time. From there, the project evolved into a kind of scavenger hunt, with Pape roaming the city on a horticultural search for flowers that could occupy the foreground while, like a mannerist painter, he zeroed his camera in on what was occurring in the middle distance. Usually, the roses are out…

At the moment, I’m near a building in the East Village that in the 1980s used to be the home of a club called the World, where, apparently, a lot of firsts happened, such as Björk performing in the United States. Of course, today everything is different here, but a few things are the same. For example, Björk has to watch for paparazzi and phone cameras now, but I’ve heard from many New Yorkers that until very recently, she’d often go alone to out-of-the-way bars just to dance—hiding in plain sight. When we read about the ’80s and its parties, there is always mention of an epidemic, the AIDS crisis, and how it set a tone, acting both as deterrent and impetus for going out. Partyers showed bravery, or maybe…

James Barnor’s deeply personal artistic practice has traversed cities, continents, and genres over six decades, all in reverence of the African diaspora. Barnor is a newsman, studio photographer, and fashion image maker. But the too common neglect of Black artists in the art world means his genteel images have been presented only on a handful of grandstand stages, beginning with exhibitions in London, in 2010, and Ghana, in 2012. Now, art history is finally catching up. Barnor, who was born in Ghana in 1929, was pronounced a 2020 recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Awards, and his work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries this year. The result of cataloging tens of thousands of photographs, the eponymous exhibition James Barnor will be the most…

One thing I find transporting about photography, in general, and these pictures, in particular, is that they are, first and foremost and irrefutably, images, which makes them different from language as I practice it, with words. This might seem obvious at first, but it’s not, really; we live in an age where all information is treated the same, flattened out, ingested, and discarded, because for all sorts of reasons, language has in recent years been cheapened, exploited, moralized, and it’s almost too much to think about. But we must think about it if we are going to say anything of value about pictures, or language, or any aspect of being, let alone aesthetic work, because it’s time to bring the specificity of language back if we are to understand what…

In March 2020, within weeks of the first diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in New York, Philip Montgomery began documenting the health-care workers and staff in nine of the city’s hospitals. On his first day, 1,162 new patients had been hospitalized with the disease, and 349 had died. By April 6, his last day, 19,177 people had been hospitalized with the virus in New York, and 3,202 had died. As the story shifted to how New Yorkers would mourn an unimaginable loss, Montgomery chronicled a funeral home in the Bronx, where two undertakers strove to provide services with dignity in a time of isolation. Montgomery hoped his images would “galvanize” the country—and testify to the scale of the tragedy. One of the most accomplished photojournalists of his generation, Montgomery has covered…

Too much weight is often placed on the value of an outsider’s vision, presumed to be clear and unfettered. But what of the insider? He who can witness more intimately what the outsider cannot. That has long been Rafael Rios’s prerogative. The New York–based photographer’s images center on his extended Puerto Rican family, many of whom have lived in the same Fort Greene house since his aunt and uncle bought it in the early 1980s. Growing up, he and his parents lived on the top floor, his cousins on the second, and his aunt and uncle on the ground floor. His work tells the story of this house as much as it does that of his family members. And both are memorialized in his aptly titled 2018 book, Family, which…

Among the great or later-to-be-great New York photographers of the middle of the last century, Saul Leiter bested them all in caring the least about fame or legacy. “I wasn’t burdened by importance,” he said a few years before his death in 2013, synopsizing a devotion to unfettered autonomy that has itself come to shape his legacy. What his reticence meant, practically speaking, was that many thousands of the pictures he took over almost seven decades were never developed, printed, or seen during his lifetime, despite the fame that came thundering to his doorstep with the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color. “Before he died, he said that what we had seen of his work was just the tip of the iceberg, and we’re really only now finding out…

I happened to be reading Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) when these photographs by Widline Cadet landed in my in-box. Although, Cadet’s photographs might have a more likely kinship with Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), his highly personal study, in which he writes that “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.” Eyes closed, I tried to re-create my own version of these images, which would remain with me long after they were out of sight. What persisted was their coupling and twinning, what in a mix of Haitian Creole and English (Crenglish) one might call their marasa-ness. In a section on “figures” in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes, “A figure is established if at least someone can…

When I first started surfing in Rockaway, I’d get up early and take the A train from my apartment in Brooklyn and transfer to the S train at Broad Channel, a forty-five-minute trip, if I was lucky. I’d change into my wet suit in a shared surf shack, surf for an hour or two, maybe chatting with the photographer Roe Ethridge or other surfers in the lineup. I could be back by noon. Coming into “the city” after a morning surf always felt like I carried a secret—surfing in New York, with dolphins, whales even!—as I wandered through gallery shows in Chelsea or sensed water pockets displace in my ears during faculty meetings at Pratt. I now live in Rockaway full time, since before Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, which destroyed…