Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2024 i Aperture

Takuma Nakahira A leading photographer and critic, Takuma Nakahira had a lasting impact on Japanese art after World War II, from his poetic images to his perceptive writing on art and his work as a founder of Provoke—an influential, short-lived magazine of experimental photographic expression. Burn—Overflow, a long-awaited exhibition organized by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, examines Nakahira’s wide-ranging career through the perspective of his critical commitments and fascination with the tension between words and images. The show features more than four hundred works and documents, moving chronologically through five sections, from the Provoke era and Nakahira’s first photobook, For a Language to Come (1970), to his engagements with urban space and landscape as an apparatus of political power, providing an expansive context for the photographer’s radical social…

In Bombay, the restless metropolis that houses India’s twelve-billion-dollar Hindi cinema industry, the 1990s were a moment of roiling change. The cultural and visual excesses that had dictated the medium for the last decade were winding down, but the sheen of power and glamour remained. It was in this milieu that the young Bombay-based photographer Ketaki Sheth struck up a friendship with the prominent film critic Khalid Mohamed and found herself in the midst of the vast industry that is now somewhat coarsely referred to as “Bollywood.” From premiere parties where aspiring starlets jostled for attention to union rooms in which unemployed stuntmen played endless games of carrom, this was a world with its own language, hierarchies, and rules, and Sheth set about photographing it from the perspective of a…

“This stocky, unrevealing box stands 3 ft. high without stockings or feet and lights up like a Xmas tree no matter what I show it.” So begins an entry about the photocopy machine, typed on a small placard, by Pati Hill, the American artist and writer, who was the subject of a small yet thrilling survey exhibition at New York’s Printed Matter last fall. The entry continues: “[The photocopier] repeats my words perfectly as many times as I ask it to, but when I show it a hair curler it hands me back a spaceship, and when I show it the inside of a straw hat it describes the eerie joys of a descent into a volcano.” To Hill’s confusion and wonder, common objects become strange and beautiful. A hairbrush…

It is 1994 in Tokyo and Mariko Mori is angry. She has just come out of a business meeting, and is appalled to find that intelligent women, with degrees from leading universities, are being made to serve tea while working at the office. She has recently returned from five years overseas, studying art in London at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, followed by two years in New York at the Whitney Museum’s rigorous Independent Study Program. “I was exposed to seeing the position of women in the West,” she recalled in a recent conversation with me, speaking from her home in New York. “I was shocked. I wanted to demonstrate, as a social criticism, the lack of equality for women in Japan.” Dressed in a silver bodysuit with…

The Razor’s Edge The Razor’s Edge, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1946, is a movie I repeatedly return to for solace and respite from contemporary life. Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel of the same name, it tracks the odyssey of a World War I fighter pilot, Larry Darrell, after he returns to the United States, determined not to adjust to the status quo. He makes a beeline out of high society and into, as Elliott Templeton, his fiancée’s uncle and a favorite character of mine, snarls, “the hoi polloi.” This humbler route leads Darrell through coal mines and cargo ships to a monastery in the Himalayas, where he learns after months of solitude that, from his point of view, the meaning of living is the achievement…

When the People’s War began in Nepal, in 1996, eight-year-old Prasiit Sthapit noticed that his great-grandfather’s portrait had suddenly disappeared from the living-room wall. Later, as an adult, he realized that the picture of the mustachioed man he had assumed to be his great-grandfather was, in fact, a framed poster of Joseph Stalin. Sthapit’s grandfather, an ardent Communist, looked up to Stalin. In the decade-long, violent armed conflict between the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN-Maoist) and the state, anyone left-leaning was seen as a Maoist sympathizer, and many were arrested or, worse, disappeared. During Sthapit’s teen years, his family’s political leanings, as well as his own youthful romanticization of what a revolution symbolizes, made him curious about the bloody rebellion that shook Nepal. His interest in this history deepened in…

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland features numerous photographs, including one of Dolours Price, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who was photographed in the 1970s for the Italian publication L’Europeo. How did her image make it onto the cover of your book? I’ve been working for the last several years on a limited dramatic series based on the book, which I’m producing. So, this question of image and self-presentation has been very much on my mind. Dolours Price was attuned to the iconography of revolutionary glamour. That was helpful for me in understanding her as a character but also the way seductive imagery could pull people into radical politics. She and many of her contemporaries were obsessed with Che Guevara, and specifically with…

For much of last summer, the mountains on the North Shore appeared to buffer Vancouver from the smoke of forest fires that had engulfed the rest of Canada. Even with its summer breeze of cedar and sea, the city felt uneasy. In particular, the infamously down-and-out Downtown Eastside—with its single-room occupancy rentals, its dive bars, its fentanyl, crack, and heroin, its encampments that police periodically remove, its alleys of the unhoused—had never seemed more on edge. Vancouverites accept a certain level of grit and abjection, which comes through in images by the city’s most celebrated photographers, from Fred Herzog to Greg Girard, but the atmosphere feels different after the pandemic. Even my wife, who grew up in Strathcona, the residential neighborhood adjacent to the Downtown Eastside, told me on our…

“My dream was to get out of New Haven,” writes Jim Goldberg in his 2017 photobook, Candy, a coming-of-age story that tracks his 1973 move west and the beginnings of his life as an artist, a seeker, and a man in near-constant motion. Goldberg’s eye was attuned to inequality. His first book, Rich and Poor (1985), combined black-and-white portraits of wealthy and impoverished subjects with their hand-scrawled notes, revealing a layer of tenderness and remove in not only his newly adopted city of San Francisco but photography more broadly. Raised by Wolves (1995), a ten-year effort to chronicle the dizzying, often tragic lives of teenage runaways, became a cult classic book, in addition to an exhibition, using tactics that explode image and text with found and salvaged artifacts. In the…

A vast and variegated holiday destination, a bottomless repository of cheap Black labor, and a site of bitterly fought wars of resistance against colonial dispossession—South Africa’s Eastern Cape is as beautiful as it is unknowable. The province occupies the moodiest quarter of the country’s coastline and stretches into the semiarid escarpment and the southern edge of the Drakensberg mountain range. Its landscape is at parts lush, rugged, pristine, and broken. In the Johannesburg-based photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s newest series Ezilalini (The Country) (2020–ongoing), the elements guide a search for wholeness. The terrain—misty, parched, and undulating—offers more vestiges and apparitions than signposts. Sobekwa likens the segue into this project, in which he travels between the township of Thokoza, where he grew up, and his parents’ rural homesteads, to “digging a hole I’m…

Ari Marcopoulos’s personal library reflects kinetic engagements with subcultures of the world that connect to his own wide-ranging work. “Already, look, we’re surrounded by them,” Marcopoulos, a photographer and filmmaker, said during a recent visit at his Brooklyn home, where a capacious, free-flowing arrangement of books lines the walls of an upstairs landing. More than eighty boxes were packed into his studio for an upcoming move. Marcopoulos has published some two hundred books and zines of his own (Zines, a collection of the latter, was published in 2023 by Aperture). He is refreshingly unconcerned about the preciousness of the books and magazines he collects. With equal admiration, he cited a rare, expensive edition of Yutaka Takanashi’s Toshi-e (Towards the City, 1974) bought in Japan; a notebook by the filmmaker Pedro Costa,…

Magnum Foundation expands creativity and diversity in visual storytelling, activating new audiences and ideas through the innovative use of images. Through grant making, mentorship, and creative collaborations, we partner with socially engaged imagemakers exploring new models for storytelling.…