Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i Aperture

“Photographs can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way,” Susan Sontag observed. Hers was a reference to more prurient activities, but she also allowed that desire could be abstract, something more slippery. The compulsion to want—or, in today’s parlance, to manifest—emerges throughout these pages directly and indirectly, as both an impulse and a state of mind. The manufacture of desire might be fashion’s and advertising’s most consistent product and its very lifeblood. Ubiquitous and irreverent, Juergen Teller’s photographs upend our vocabulary of glamour and aspiration, trading conventional beauty for the more peculiar. Whether it is a luxe handbag, a beaming, wide-eyed baby, or a lithe model making her way to a casting, his binding agent is a hard flash and an arresting directness. He is at the center of…

Sometime around 1987, at the age of seven, I got caught looking. I was curled up on the sofa after school, watching MTV with the volume down low. The channel was all but verboten in our house at the time. At some point, the video for Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” came on, featuring the singer herself as an exotic dancer who—spoiler alert!—ultimately escapes from the peep-show theater in which she performs. I was immediately entranced. I turned the volume lower still, ashamed but unable to avert my eyes. And then, just as Madonna pranced across the screen clad in a black satin bustier complete with gold nipple caps and tassels, my mother walked into the living room. “What are you watching?” she asked, somewhat dismayed to find me mesmerized by…

By turns luxe and austere, sometimes both in the same image, the work of Paul Outerbridge occupies a special vantage in the sleek, vexed space between modernism and Madison Avenue. In the black-and-white Ide Collar (1922), which was made the year he began photographing for Vogue, a detached white shirt collar—a svelte size fourteen and three-quarters—sits alone on a checker-board surface. The picture is part New Realist severity, part found object or readymade (Marcel Duchamp tacked a copy on his studio wall), and wholly expressive of the venerating isolation that has been essential to product photography since its inception in the 1850s. In Outerbridge’s later advertising work, especially the color carbro prints for which he is now best known, a busier style of composition dominates. But objects still float in…

In Polk County, Florida, Nabil Harb arranges his calendar around nights when the light turns green at dusk, how the shadows look blue in spring, or how the cicadas start to hum as the temperature reaches a hundred degrees. To live here is to know the feeling of humidity enveloping you like a duvet in July. To know in what oak hammocks you’ll find butterfly orchids blooming by May. And to count the seconds between lightning strikes and thunder in August. More than five and you’ll be fine. Then, come September, Polk County’s creeks, rivers, and trickling branches of sweet water swell. The Green Swamp at the northern edge of the county collects the remnants of the afternoon storms before that water moves south into the Peace River as it…

Ishiuchi has been one of Japan’s foremost photographers practically from the moment she first picked up a camera. Maybe it’s just because it’s our first meeting, but Ishiuchi Miyako frequently deflects from herself when she speaks. She relishes asserting, several times over the course of the afternoon we spend together at her home in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, about two hours by express train north and inland from Tokyo, that she’s not really a photographer. Yet she’s been one of Japan’s foremost photographers practically from the moment she first picked up a camera, after receiving some equipment from a friend, in the mid-1970s. Ishiuchi insists that she doesn’t take many photographs and that, when she does, she never fusses over composition. And she demurs that she’s no writer, despite being a…

The German photographer Heji Shin is drawn to complicated, at times fraught subjects. She has intrigued, and provoked, audiences with her images presented in galleries and at the Whitney Biennial, and through her work as a sough-tafter fashion photographer. Her most recent series, The Big Nudes (2023), comprising large-scale portraits of pigs, borrows its title from Helmut Newton. Why is Helmut Newton important to you? Every fashion photographer loves—or at least knows—him. I’ve loved him for as long as I can remember. The Big Nudes are his huge, sculptural photographs of women. They are not very light or feminine. There’s a bar in Berlin, Newton Bar, near the German parliament, where you can smoke cigars, that has reproductions or maybe even original Big Nudes on the walls. Is this a…

Tanya Traboulsi is an ardent observer of the Lebanese coastline. Her photographs probe the ways in which clay tennis courts and fake grass playing fields are tucked into the hills sliding down to the sea in Ras Beirut, on the western side of the city’s promontory. She is also a dedicated student of vernacular architecture. She details vestibules, awnings, bougainvillea peeking through tactical breeze-blocks, and the elegant arches of a derelict Ottoman mansion. She returns again and again to the playfulness with which shopkeepers in the Lebanese capital use language to advertise the Renaissance Sporting Club, New Fashion, or Dalida, a tiny chocolatier downgraded under financial duress to an all-purpose dekaneh, or grocery store, named for a pop music sensation. Traboulsi’s series Beirut, Recurring Dream (2021–ongoing) pairs photographs she has…

Over the last thirty years, Juergen Teller has been at the vanguard of fashion photography. His work resists the idea of fashion as the projection of a polished ideal, favoring objective clarity to shine a light through the smoke and mirrors of promotion and commerce. He has shaped the advertising campaigns of visionary designers such as Helmut Lang, Phoebe Philo (for Celine), JW Anderson (including his work for Loewe), and Vivienne Westwood, as well as his memorable editorials for fashion magazines. Running parallel is Teller’s ongoing commitment to producing photobooks, in a range of sizes and on a range of subjects, which often irreverently refer back to Teller himself, his personal life, and his own body. This season, Teller’s work is the subject of a major exhibition at the Grand…

In December 1972, the photographer Melissa Shook found herself stuck at home in her apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side nursing a toe infection. Removed from her usual busy routine, she began to take daily self-portraits. In a diary from that month, she notes what she photographed each day, along with domestic details and increasingly involved meditations on loneliness and abandonment, the struggles of being a single parent, difficult family dynamics, and her ambitions as a photographer: December 5, “A romantic shot of me with the avocado plants.” December 7, “2¼ me, nude, alone in sunlight. Terrible sadness at how detached I am. Real sorrow at not loving anyone, the wall of fear.” December 30, “It was a lovely and incredible day. It’s very difficult to write about—if I do…

In the spring and summer of 2020, as COVID-19 restrictions halted travel and kept millions of people indoors, cities began to get wild again. Deer grazed in the streets of Nara, Japan, and dolphins were spotted in the canals of Venice. Nature seemed to be taking back control. Yet when the photographer Oto Gillen wandered the avenues along the west side of Manhattan, where he was born and raised and still lives today, he noticed a very different kind of super bloom: crops of fake flowers, their toob-right petals fashioned from synthetic fabrics and plastic, sprouting from the sides of bars and restaurants or emerging from real dirt in sidewalk planters. Overnight, grimy corners became kitschy Instagram backdrops designed to attract outdoor diners. Gillen sensed something more sinister in these…

A cool breeze blows in from the wide-open windows on both sides of the artist Jonathas de Andrade’s modernist flat in Recife, a city in the northeast of Brazil. It’s June, the end of autumn in this part of the world, but it feels more like the peak of summer. “Ventilation is gold here,” he says, adding that it’s not just because of the humid and intense tropical heat of the region, but because otherwise everything would go stale and grow mold. Water hangs heavy in the air and drops without ceremony everywhere, in buckets of sweat, and sometimes as tears. It’s no wonder that de Andrade—one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in Brazil, an art-world darling graced with survey shows across the globe, from Chicago to Paris, including…

One Sunday in April 1972, the New York Times ran a notice under the column News of the Camera World announcing openings for transfer students to the Cooper Union in New York who “demonstrate a serious and mature commitment to photography.” The Pioneer, Cooper’s student newspaper, highlighted the school’s darkrooms and silk-screen facilities, along with the prominent faculty, including Roy DeCarava, Inge Morath, Joel Meyerowitz, and Tod Papageorge. A portfolio of “exceptional merit” would be required for application. Mitch Epstein happened to see that Times piece. “And I seized the opportunity,” he told me earlier this year, at his light-filled home and studio on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “I came down, submitted a portfolio, did an interview, got in, and it was golden—because there’s no…

While some artists are content to create discrete works, Awol Erizku builds an endlessly expanding universe of seductive symbols and visual cues. Born in Gondar, Ethiopia, raised in the Bronx, and now residing in Los Angeles, Erizku fluidly mixes and moves across media. In his indelible portraits, an expectant Beyoncé appears regally perched atop a red Porsche, and the poet Amanda Gorman is a beaming galactic vision. Clever nods to African and African American culture permeate his work—recently published in the Aperture book Mystic Parallax (2023)—alongside knowing references to surrealism, spirituality, or whatever salient cultural touchpoint has lately captured his attention. Fragment of a Queen’s Face I probably started going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a kid on school field trips. I’ve never forgotten this sculpture fragment in…

Never has Ophelia looked so playful. In Hisae Imai’s 1960 Ophelia, the character blooms not as Hamlet’s betrothed but as a Japanese girl, tinted blue, patiently stuffing leaves into her mouth. Her hair, curling in the wind, looks alive. Her nails are bejeweled. “Poor Ophelia,” the King laments in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia, having gone mad, drowns in a brook, “divided from herself and her fair judgment.” In Imai’s visual renderings, this division is not within Ophelia but in how we might interpret her face and expression. Is that two dabs of glitter on her cheek, or a tear? Are we interrupting the most unthinkable time in a life—the necessary solitude of the seconds before death? In Imai’s recasting, we do not see Ophelia’s long hair submerged into a brook—a…

Nakeya Brown began making still lifes in 2012, after her baby was born. Motherhood changed Brown’s relationship to time, forcing her to fit a practice into fragmented days and corners of her home. In arranging the Afro pick in Nu-Vogue (2022) or the eucalyptus stem in Native-Accents (2020), Brown wrestled with her thoughts and stalled time. Staging these vivid, polychromatic sets became an exercise in control. That Brown, a Maryland-based photographer, works with objects of Black beauty is a consequence of maternity. Children invite reflection. Searching the banks of her memory, Brown returned to hair-care rituals and other aesthetic rites of passage in Black girlhood. She explored their attendant ideas in The Refutation of “Good Hair” (2012), a series of portraits (and some still lifes) in which Black femmes masticate…

For nearly fifty years, Kosen Ohtsubo has run roughshod over the idea of ikebana as a stately practice of arranging flowers in a vase. He is known for using vegetables, when he sticks to plants at all, and he often sets his compositions in unconventional containers. His 1984 work I Am Taking a Bath Like This was arranged in his own bathroom. On one wall, a cobalt vase in a small alcove holds some flowering irises. But this is only an accent within the wild gaiety of the entire piece, in which iris leaves have been plastered across the tiled room and gather neatly in the tub below, next to an array of flowers including roses, yellow lilies, and hydrangeas that just cover the bare chest of a man lying…

The remarkable story of the photographer Marcelo Gomes begins in northern Brazil, near the equator. It was wet there. When he was twelve, his parents took him to a concert by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, a cofounder of the avant-pop psychedelic movement Tropicália, who had been exiled from his home country during its military dictatorship. For Gomes, who grew up in a smaller city, it was a transformative, visceral experience, an introduction to how art could move people. As an adult, in 2016, he took Veloso’s picture at a concert at the Inhotim art gallery in Minas Gerais. I asked Gomes in a recent conversation what he wanted from such portraits of his heroes. “To preserve them,” he says. “There’s a dream where I’m from, a dream of Brazil…