Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2022 i Aperture

Joan Didion When Joan Didion died last year, we lost a literary giant and cultural icon. The author of the now classic collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion reinvented the long-form essay, infusing it with a searing sense of style and a distinct, probing voice. She also wrote novels, screenplays, and memoirs—and, in a moment when the written word was losing its currency, seemed to leave her mark beyond the literary world, even appearing in a chic Céline advertisement. For an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, approved by Didion before her death, another literary giant, the critic Hilton Als, pays homage to Didion by assembling works by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Silke Otto-Knapp, Ed Ruscha, and Betye Saar, among other artists. “Processing…

We tend to consider photographs in terms of what is before the lens. What does an image show us? What kind of record of the world, of life, of thought, is revealed? But we might also ask, What can a photograph do? What role does an image play in the creation of something else? For the rising fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, image references are essential. They serve as both creative inspiration and a powerful connective tissue between the distant past and the present, placing her vision within a lineage of essential Black artists and thinkers. For Johnston Marklee, a Los Angeles–based architectural studio known for its inventive collaborations with artists and arts institutions, photography and design are seen as codependent. And for William Kentridge, the South African artist widely…

In 2017, the Vienna-based multidisciplinary artist Jojo Gronostay founded Dead White Men’s Clothes (DWMC), an art project styled similarly to a fashion brand, featuring upcycled garments from the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana—one of the biggest collection points for used clothing worldwide. In those early days, he was strict about the categorization: “I always told everyone, ‘It’s an art project.’” When Gronostay first exhibited the work, he built a shop of sorts inside a Vienna art gallery. Even today, despite the project having won a 2021 Austrian Fashion Award, he resists the idea of being labeled a designer. Although his work often involves restyling clothes, he does so to ask questions about recycling, economic structures, neocolonialism, and visual representation. “If you show something in an art context, people tend to…

“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do,” said Deborah Turbeville in an interview with The New Yorker in 2011. “I’m not really a fashion photographer.” Turbeville, who was born in 1932, first entered the industry as an assistant and sample model to the fashion designer Claire McCardell before becoming a magazine editor—a job for which she had contempt. “I’d get a note from some senior fashion editor saying, ‘We find your arrival half an hour late for Bill Blass appalling,’” Turbeville explained in a 1993 interview. “I just stopped going.” When she was in her mid-thirties, she took a photography seminar with Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, impressing her teachers with her strong point of view, despite her lack of skill or technique. It was here that she found…

“Is the sun rising or setting on the United States of America?” This was the prompt the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts sent to the artist Sheida Soleimani for a new body of work. Having focused mainly on Iran and the United States in her previous projects, she decided to cast her net wider, into global politics. The resulting series, Absolute Powers (2021–22), is set against the green marble podium at the United Nations. Heavily influenced by theater set design, Soleimani fixes her eye on the world’s most visible platform for political performance, the U.N. General Assembly. “Politicians have used the famously ugly podium to manufacture publicity, control their narratives, and amplify their fantasies of power,” Soleimani, a first-generation Iranian American artist, recently told me. To capture their spirit,…

Ramón Reverté serves as the editor in chief and creative director of Editorial RM, a prestigious illustrated-book publisher based in Barcelona and Mexico City that specializes in Latin American art and photography monographs, with occasional ventures into publications that take on the history of the photobook genre, such as El fotolibro latinoamericano (The Latin American Photobook, 2011) and New York in Photobooks (2016). The independent scholar and critic María Minera describes having had “the privilege of collaborating” with Reverté twenty years ago. “I realized that I was, without a doubt, next to one of those editors for whom books, far from being commercial products, took on a dimension close to works of art,” she states. “Every detail, every image, every caption, every comma was studied with the attention that I…

FROM Abe Frajndlich Seventy Five at Seventy Five. Lives I’ve Lived Abe Frajndlich Cloth $39.95 Olmsted Trees Stanley Greenberg Tom Avermaete, Kevin Baker, and Mindy Fullilove With Photography by Stanley Greenberg Cloth $40.00 Jin-me Yoon About Time Edited by Zoë Chan and Diana Freundl With Essays by Tarah Hogue, Sharon Kahanoff, Susette Min, Anne-Marie St-Jean-Aubre, Ming Tiampo, and Diana Freundl Cloth $50.00 Nicholas Pollack Meadow Nicholas Pollack With Essays by Robert Sullivan and John Stilgoe Contributions by William Shullenberger, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Bill McKibben Cloth $39.95 David Katzenstein Ritual David Katzenstein Cloth $39.95 Twinka Thiebaud And the Art of the Pose Edited by Jayme Yahr With Essays by Henry Miller, Twinka Thiebaud, Claire Sykes, and Jayme Yahr Cloth $40.00 FROM Behind Walls Photography in Psychiatric Institutions from 1880 to 1935…

On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, who had just been elected head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), appeared at the Meredith March Against Fear in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael, alongside leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, had resolved to continue the weeks-long protest march begun by the voting-rights activist James Meredith, who, while on his solitary walk from Memphis to Jackson, had been shot by a white supremacist. Facing a crowd that evening, Carmichael grabbed a microphone and said, “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” The marchers cried back, “Black Power!” The white establishment wasn’t happy with Carmichael’s language, and photographs taken during his speech didn’t soothe its fears. The…

Fashion’s constant churn may mean that nods to the past come and go without much fanfare. But for the celebrated London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner, cultural references are conjured with careful intention. They become a form of reckoning and homage, a way to center Black artists and thinkers within a generous, ever-growing constellation of ideas. One clothing collection from 2019 was named Mumbo Jumbo, after Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel. Writing on Wales Bonner in The New Yorker, the critic Hilton Als reflects that she “aims to make the broken history of the Black artist and intellectual in African, European, and American culture whole.” She does this through her diligent research, an eponymous label, and high-profile collaborations with other companies, such as Christian Dior and Adidas, that expand her reach. Photography…

In 2018, the artist James z became fascinated with an ancient bust he photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that depicted a Roman noblewoman of Syrian origin, Julia Mamea. The next year, he traveled to Athens and further immersed himself in the architecture, sculpture, and fragmentary remains of the ancient Greek world. Welling photographed extensively, from the facades of temples to small glass game pieces, fragments of tile, and personal adornments. He focused on the gestures and expressiveness of hands carved in stone: a boy holding a luscious bunch of grapes, or Venus demurely covering her nude body. Much of this work would become the series Cento (2019–21), whose title gestures toward Welling’s method and aims. Typically referring to a work of poetry or music, a cento is made…

Katrien de Blauwer cuts, shuffles, and rearranges old photographs, often imagery from vintage magazines, to create her striking artworks. “I search for older pictures that I’m touched by,” she says during a video call in August. “And then I bring them to the present, because I’m making the work now.” Shaking her dark curls, she continues: “I have always liked that challenge—playing with the past, present, and future.” De Blauwer grew up in Belgium. As a teenager, she studied painting in Ghent before continuing her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where she focused on fashion. But her interest in repurposing photography began when she was young—about thirteen or fourteen years old. Her father had many photo-albums, and while de Blauwer was allowed to look at…

Archival images can find us in the most discreet and serendipitous ways—stashed in a forgotten book, orphaned at a flea market, tucked in the sleeves of a photo album. Their scenes are portals to a different time, and often, with patience, they are a compass for our present one. At least this is how the artist Qiana Mestrich thinks and speaks of them. Her series Toward a History of Women of Color in the Workplace (2018–ongoing) is a result of the artist’s search for answers about her past and her place as a mixed-race person in the United States. She found these images—a collection of prints from around 1969, when her mother worked as a secretary—among her family’s belongings, wrapped inconspicuously in plastic pharmacy bags. Sifting through them struck a…

Look at these two images on the previous pages, one by Daniel Stier, the other by Djeneba Aduayom. They appear here in a photography magazine, so you may ask where they came from and what their original purpose was. Or you could just enjoy them for what they are while not quite knowing. As it happens, Stier and Aduayom are artists who make images for themselves, and are also accomplished commercial photographers who receive assignments from magazines and websites—editorial work that gives them a lot of creative leeway. So there’s not a world of difference: the commissioned work is quite similar to the art they want to make anyway. In his exhibitions, Stier mixes them up and doesn’t reveal which is which. When Aduayom sends me her images now and…

If you got lucky in the summer of 1947, your hands might have wrapped themselves around a mimeographed collection of typewritten thoughts called Vice Versa. Edited under the nom de plume Lisa Ben, it was among the first of what we now think of as zines. It was almost certainly the first queer one. Small in scale and big in voice, Vice Versa defined itself from page one as “a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of Convention. . .. Please keep in mind that the entire publication was originated and compiled by one person.” That one person, “Lisa Ben,” was actually Edythe Eyde, an employee of the film production company RKO, presumably living…

During her residency at the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco sifted through material, tracing ideas of American empire, memory, and citizenship. The records she uncovered range from bureaucratic records of the Ohio chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to an image of Filipino women from the photographer Alexander Alland’s project American Counterpoint, which sought to document ethnic and racial groups in America and was published as a book in 1943. Working in the archive, without access to studio equipment, Syjuco first made images of documents and objects at low resolution. She then printed them in sections on office paper, taped the sheets together to reconstruct the original image, and rephotographed the collages in high resolution. In one image,…

In the video artwork Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School) (2010), William Kentridge stages a split-screen conversation with himself. William Kentridge stubbornly refuses to answer William Kentridge’s straightforward questions: “Can you describe your life as an artist? Can you say, rather, what it is that you did today to give us some sense of how you fill your hours?” Speaking from his studio in Johannesburg last summer, Kentridge tells the writer and fellow South African Jonathan Cane, in response to those same questions, that he had been in his studio collaborating with editors and artists; working on a large ink drawing for his career-spanning solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; preparing for a major presentation at the Broad, in Los Angeles; and revitalizing a…