Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i Aperture

Charlotte March Celebrated for her mid-century fashion photographs in Vogue and Vanity Fair—and for her portraits of the Black supermodel Donyale Luna in the West German magazine Twen—Charlotte March also extensively captured the streets and daily life of postwar Hamburg. As part of the city’s 8th Triennial of Photography, Currency, which considers themes of circulation and knowledge, March’s work is being presented at the Falckenberg Collection. This retrospective focuses on March’s sensitive portrayals of Hamburg, where she lived throughout her life, and Ischia, Italy, where she traveled in the 1950s and 1960s. “In their depiction of forms of simple work and social life that were already disappearing at the time they were taken,” say the curators Goesta Diercks and Dirk Luckow, March’s images “can be read as a reference to…

On West Jefferson Boulevard, a four-lane thoroughfare that cuts east-west through South Central Los Angeles, the din of the city is loud as cars and trucks streak down the blocks. Anthony Hernandez’s studio occupies a small storefront right on West Jefferson, in a brief commercial district squeezed between the more residential, “historic” neighborhoods of Jefferson Park and West Adams. On a sunny Saturday morning in mid-February, its painted-pink facade seemed to bask in the heavy sunlight and sound, soaking them both in. Across the street, a clothes boutique blasted reggaeton from speakers stationed by its open doors. Once inside, the street seemed to fall away. As I walked into his studio, I felt the air cool and the light brighten to a crisp white. The clamor of the city quickly…

For his latest book, A Pound of Pictures, Alec Soth originally set out by car to follow the route of Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 funeral train, hoping to consider America’s current political division through the prism of a past historical crisis. When that idea felt forced, he let it go. But he kept driving. In Los Angeles, he encountered a woman who, to his astonishment, sold photographs by the pound. This discovery yielded compelling images of images and gave Soth a leitmotif: the weight of photography’s own history. For Soth, this weight was not a burden but rather a wellspring of connections and associations found in the surfaces of his surroundings and in his travels to cemeteries, darkrooms, and bedrooms that reference Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Nan Goldin, to name just…

Sophie Calle has squatted in an abandoned Parisian hotel, worked as a nosy chambermaid, and followed an unsuspecting stranger across Venice—all to create uncanny works with the pulse of detective stories. Her artistic career began with a kind of sleepwalking. In 1978, Sophie Calle spent her days strolling Paris. She had just returned to France after seven years of travel. Like so many artists and writers before her, she walked the French capital. On one of her ambles, she noticed a door ajar. It opened into an abandoned hotel connected to the former Orsay train station. It was as if she had drifted into a dream. She wandered the empty building and then left, taking note to come back. That year, Calle started making the work that she would become…

As the Belgian artist Etienne Courtois and I chat over Zoom, a strange thing happens: someone crawls into a corner of the frame, a blonde head advancing and retreating in and out of the lamplight at intervals over the course of our conversation. I don’t mention it, but note to myself that it’s just the kind of curious detail Courtois has been chasing, then creating, for over a decade. Courtois, a civil engineer turned investment banker, became obsessed with photography around the turn of the twenty-first century, looking and reading voraciously. In 2010, the bank he worked for collapsed in the wake of the financial crisis, and Courtois quit his day job. In the same year, he made an image of his young daughter as a response to a prompt…

Anna Stüdeli’s work exudes an uneasy tension. Concerned with our basic instincts and how they come into play within social interaction, she evokes the repulsive in the attractive and vice versa in order to explore the ambiguity of our impulses and motivations in relation to our surroundings. Born in Switzerland and living between Zurich and Hamburg, Stüdeli produces mainly sculptures and installations out of plaster, latex, horsehair, and other materials. PRIMAL (Edition Patrick Frey, 2021; 156 pages, $50), her first photobook, is the result of the artist’s ongoing reflection on commercial photography and how it generates demand by seducing and teasing consumers. Stüdeli has assembled an archive of more than 1,200 close-ups she took of billboard ads and advertising posters. In 2017, she used some of these images in her…

Alice Neel I came to art via painting. I made sloppy abstract paintings because it was all I could do. At the time, I was focused on the Abstract Expressionists and didn’t even know the work of figurative painters such as Alice Neel. If I’d discovered her portraits back then, maybe I would’ve continued painting. The mix of intimacy and intensity in her canvases is a constant source of inspiration. John Cage and Richard Long When I was in high school, I had a recurring dream about meeting John Cage. While I never did meet him and no longer have those dreams, Cage is still present in my life. In 2013, I even published a book of his writings. Another of my teenage creative crushes was Richard Long. He taught…

Doctor: You see her eyes are open. Gentlewoman: Ay, but their sense are shut. —Macbeth, act 5, scene 1 Unlike a dreamer or someone under hypnosis, a sleepwalker looks awake; they will leave their bed and move and even speak as if conscious. Their altered state may cause them to reveal their innermost thoughts, as does Lady Macbeth, who’s haunted by the deaths she and Macbeth have wrought, and every night gets up, paces, and rubs at the blood she imagines still stains her hands, indelible and stinking: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” Witnessing someone under the spell is an eerie experience, like eavesdropping on their secrets; it feels voyeuristic, since the sleepwalker does not know you are there. “You have known what you…

“One could say that Lee’s feel for the incongruities of daily life made her a Surrealist,” writes Lee Miller’s biographer, Carolyn Burke. Although she was never an official member of the group (according to Burke, she couldn’t abide André Breton), her feeling for incongruity and unexpected juxtapositions, for dreamlike imagery and tears in consciousness, her ability to perceive instabilities in apparently ordinary scenes, and her ethical commitments to getting the picture against all odds make her one of the movement’s great photographers. Miller was surrounded by Surrealist men in both her personal and professional lives. Her mentor turned lover, Man Ray, introduced her to Surrealist art and artistic circles in late 1920s Paris; she starred in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930); her second husband, Roland Penrose, was…

The photographer Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. makes imagery that is weird, obscure, ambiguous, and freaky, packed with impossible, hard-to-decipher elements that never betray any simple or obvious meaning. His titles are cryptic, often splitting the difference between punchy non sequiturs and deeply felt but emotionally abstract poetry—information that only gets more puzzling when you learn that Brown writes them in reference to part of the overall picture. His subjects, who are without exception Black men and women, are often out of frame, subtly distorted, or caught in the cross fire of competing optical illusions. In the rare instances when they face Brown’s camera directly, their features are lit up with campfire-story menace or bolts of neon light, their expressions halfway between a belly laugh and a masklike grimace. Inspired by…

The still unfolding saga of Vivian Maier, the Chicago street photographer whose extraordinary archive was discovered at an unclaimed storage auction, is predicated on mystery. When the contents of the five lockers containing Maier’s earthly possessions were first breached in 2007, then dispersed to various pickers, literally nothing was known about the woman who filled them. The eight tons of artifacts she left in storage included over 140,000 photographic images, most unprocessed or unprinted, and comprised the sum total of Maier’s strange and fascinating vision of the world. But it was a full two years before the principal buyer, twenty-six-year-old real estate agent John Maloof, identified Maier and realized that, unbeknownst to him, she had been living nearby and had just died at the age of eighty-three. Granted full access…

It is easy to imagine Alec Soth daydreaming in pictures. As an acclaimed photographer, teacher, publisher, YouTuber, and one-time blogger, he is as dedicated to thinking about what pictures mean as he is to making them. Since his acclaimed 2004 debut, Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series he described not as a chronicle of place but an excuse to wander, Soth has made lyrical bodies of work—modest meditations on consciousness—that parse the surfaces of the everyday. “In my projects, I allow myself to change course and follow my nose,” he notes of his process, which is decidedly driven by a search for serendipity. As guest editor, Soth pursued a theme that wouldn’t constrain him. “This ‘Sleepwalking’ issue,” he says, “is one in which I’m always surprised on turning the page,…

Dream logic is essentially sideways logic: similarities or kinships that work not by means of sense but along other avenues of relationship. Puns, for example, exhibit dream logic. What kind of socks do bears wear? None. They usually have bare feet. Visual puns likewise find resemblances between objects not otherwise the same. Since human eyes are self-interested, the similarities they tend to discover are to human faces, from the composite vegetative figures of the sixteenth-century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo to those comic staples of today’s social media, the carrot that seems to smirk or the leering face in a tree. Back up eighty years, and here’s the Czech Surrealist photographer Emila Medková, carrying out an austere version of the same absurdist project. Her work spans four decades, from the end of…

Gregor Schneider’s spaces make you feel like you’re being swallowed up by your own fears, your own memories. At the 2001 Venice Biennale, he transplanted the inner world of his parents’ house to the Giardini: inside the Nazi-era German Pavilion, visitors entered a nightmare of West German stuffiness—cramped, stifling, psychotic—extensions and replicas of the original rooms. It earned Schneider the Golden Lion award. People queued for six hours. “They could have visited the same house in Rheydt, back in the Rhineland,” Schneider told me recently. Today, he lives across from Haus u r (as the original project is called), which he has been working on since 1985, when he was just sixteen. Still fully in its grip, the artist has warehoused the countless copies of those rooms (Schneider calls them…

Photography is notable both for its ability to objectively witness, and, paradoxically, for its access to the surreal. Something beyond our control can happen after the lens closes. It might be a light leak, movement recorded as blur, some shadow unaccounted for. History is similarly ambivalent, an uneasy conglomerate of fiction and testimony, which often employs photography in staking its claims. It is precisely in the overlap between these two murky territories that Maja Daniels, a Swedish photographer based in London and Gothenburg, begins her work. To Daniels, the past is just as fictitious as the future. She leans into the all-too-human penchant for mythmaking and fantasy, our desire for saints and sorcerers and false closures. What becomes apparent is that history is a patchwork of stories and images, a…

Duane Michals doesn’t mince words—about his photography, or anyone else’s. And why should he? Born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Michals had traveled the world by age thirty, from the truck stops of Texas to army service in Germany to the gray-gold landscape of Cold War Russia. By the mid-1960s, he found a home in downtown New York, a partner in the late architect Fred Gorrée, and the kind of success in commercial and editorial photography that allowed him to take risks in his own work: building sequences with the theatrical engagement of cinema, staging narratives about queer desires, and adding text in his unmistakable script. Michals risked sentimentality in pursuit of talking about “unphotographable things.” Last September, in the balm of late summer, Michals welcomed Jesse Dorris into the…