Aperture Fall 2024

JASON HICKEL (“Imagination,” page 92) is an economic anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His research focuses on global political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (2017) and Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020). He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, and many other publications. RACHEL KUSHNER (“Endnote,” page 144) is a Los Angeles–based author whose novels include Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018), which was the winner of the Prix Médicis and a finalist for the Booker Prize. Her latest books include her collection of essays The Hard…

2024 FotoFocus Biennial Titled backstories, the seventh edition of FotoFocus is conceived around “stories that are not evident at first glance,” satisfying desires for secret histories and deepening the art world’s long archival turn. The biennial features more than one hundred photographers and eighty-three venues in Cincinnati and the region, with highlights including major presentations of work by Ansel Adams, the Columbus-raised Ming Smith, the late British Nigerian portraitist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Barbara Probst, best known for photographing a single instant from multiple points of view, shattering the medium’s traditional frame. 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: backstories at venues in Greater Cincinnati, September 26–October 31, 2024 Photographing Britain In 1980s England, a collective of musicians and activists sought to combat racism in the United Kingdom at a time when right-wing nativist groups…

Robert Frank spent the summer of 1972 crisscrossing America—not in pursuit of the lyrical social documentary for which he was already famed, but as part of the Rolling Stones’ forty-eight-date mobile bacchanal. It had been three years since the disastrous show at the Altamont Speedway, and the band was stateside again, on the heels of a recording session in the south of France that is now etched in the annals of debauched rock excess. The tour was no exception—sex and drugs and everything else, all later mordantly recounted by Truman Capote to Andy Warhol in the pages of the magazine named for the group. The novelist registered his surprise that so much of it was unabashedly documented, that Frank was always there, camera at hand. In many ways, the tour…

Thirty-three years ago, a man in Los Angeles named George Holliday used his new camcorder to film what would come to be known as the Rodney King tape. In 1993, the Whitney Biennial looped the entire ten-minute clip at the entrance to the exhibition, relegating King to the unwitting star of a white man’s art project. In 2020, amid the international wave of uprisings after the hypervisible murders of Black people at the hands of the police, Holliday attempted to auction the camera he used to record the footage with a starting bid of $225,000. By that time, King himself had been dead for eight years, having drowned, at the age of forty-seven, in his swimming pool on Father’s Day in 2012. This abysmal chronology begs the question: How was…

Over the last decade, the Art Gallery of Ontario embarked on an initiative to incorporate twentieth-century photography detailing life in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico into its collections. Beyond poetic images created by Graciela Iturbide and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the Toronto museum also houses photographs of protests and coups. Such grim subjects might be expected in a Latin American collection: during the latter half of the century, the region was convulsed by civil wars, a genocide, dictatorship, and murderous US intervention. One recent acquisition provides an unexpected twist: lushly colored images by Rafael Goldchain, a Chilean-born photographer of Polish Jewish heritage, who settled in Toronto in the 1970s and in the mid-1980s traveled on a grant to Mexico and Central America. There, he took pictures of…

Grandpa wearing his best Sunday suit, the second cousin’s first communion, the aunt who made it big as a singer in Bollywood, a family member whose name nobody can ever remember in costume at the carnival parade, the uncle who moved to Brazil never to return but kept sending gifts and photographs. These are some of the images one may encounter in Goa Familia, an archive documenting family histories through vernacular photography, with highlights presented as an installation each year in Panjim, Goa’s capital. Last December, I visited its third edition, curated by Akshay Mahajan and Lina Vincent and titled Let the Sound Linger, hinting at the potential of both songs and photographs to remain in one’s mind well after being heard or seen. There were few original prints—perhaps they…