Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2024 i Aperture

PAOLA ANTONELLI (“Metabolic Images,” page 72) is senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has curated exhibitions including Design and the Elastic Mind (2008, on design and science) and Broken Nature (2019, on design and ecology) and spearheaded the acquisition into MoMA’s collection of video games, data visualization design, and even the @sign. Her most recent book is Design Emergency: Building a Better Future (2022), coauthored with Alice Rawsthorn, with whom she also runs a podcast about design. KATE CRAWFORD (“Metabolic Images,” page 72) is a leading scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair of AI…

There’s more than meets the eye in the centuries-old farmhouse that the Dutch artist Ruth van Beek calls her home and studio. Located in the idyllic small town of Koog aan de Zaan, her forest-green house is picturesque and holds a mesmerizing archive and workspace. Last summer, I rang the brass buzzer to meet with Van Beek, who has lived and worked here for more than twenty years. The structure offers an appropriate backdrop for Van Beek’s artwork, a distinct exploration of photography and collage that uses archival images, bizarre folds, and pastel-colored shapes to often obstruct what lies in view. Van Beek was born and raised in Zaanstad, a municipality just northwest of Amsterdam along the slumbering Zaan River. She moved to Amsterdam in the 1990s to study photography…

Long before the torrent of attention unleashed by ChatGPT’s public release in November 2022, the artist Trevor Paglen was patiently teaching us about the underlying technologies and training sets of artificial intelligence. He not only demonstrated how they interpret images—rendering them into data whose applications have severe social and moral consequences—but also unveiled what they are made of. Paglen’s art is about surveillance, technology, and hidden forms of power. But one could also say his work is about faith and doubt: It bolsters our faith that certain things we can’t see really do exist, and sows doubt about whether we consented to live in a society where certain things exist. CIA black sites and rendition programs. Spy satellites. Secret military bases. Machine-hallucinated images. Racist classification schemes fueling facial recognition systems.…

Despite the tsunami of headlines about artificial intelligence, Kate Crawford believes we’re still underestimating its capacity to upend the planet. The Australian-born, New York–based professor and author has been a leading voice on the social and ecological impact of AI since she first began studying training datasets in detail nearly a decade ago. Her revelatory 2021 book, Atlas of AI, issued a sweeping corrective to the idea that AI is a purely immaterial realm of ones and zeroes, mapping out the mining sites, factories, and data centers that make machine learning work. “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent,” she observes, but requires the extraction of massive amounts of human labor, data, and natural resources. Rather than confine her work to journals and academic conferences, Crawford has regularly collaborated with artists…

In 1984, Fred Ritchin published an article in the New York Times Magazine called “Photography’s New Bag of Tricks,” an early reflection—and warning—on how digital technology would rewrite the rules of image making. Photoshop would not hit the market for several years, and digital imaging at the time required colossally expensive machines. Still, Ritchin saw that these changes in how pictures were made could upend the fields of documentary photography and journalism. Of course, photographs had always been manipulated—for political propaganda, advertising, or artistic experimentation—but now such interventions would become easier to do and more difficult to detect. What would this mean for the photograph’s ability to be a reliable messenger of events as they happened? Ritchin founded the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography program at the International Center of Photography…

Hans Gremmen commands a singular respect in the photobook world. For twenty years, the Dutch designer has quietly pushed the conceptual and physical boundaries of the medium, expanding—across more than three hundred volumes—what is possible in the interplay of image and printed page. Here, the photographer Aaron Schuman speaks with Gremmen about the arc of his prolific career as well as his inspirations, his frustrations, and his careful and collaborative approach to photobook design. Aaron Schuman: When did you first get into graphic design? Hans Gremmen: When I was twelve or thirteen, I was always passing by this silk screen shop. My parents were divorced. My mother lived in a village five kilometers from my father, and this shop was at about the halfway point. They printed T-shirts, and for…

Rosalind Fox Solomon turned to photography in her late thirties, leaving an unhappy marriage to study with Lisette Model, who encouraged her to forget what the people around her thought, to follow her art, and, above all, to embrace risk. Fox Solomon would do just that, devoting herself to making images across New York, the American South, Latin America, Japan, and elsewhere, compressing rituals and riddles of the everyday into her chosen format of the black-and-white square. While her pictures have tended to focus on either people in her immediate orbit or strangers, her latest book, A Woman I Once Knew (MACK, 2024), assembles dozens of self-portraits, often nudes, which she has now, at age ninety-four, decided to publish. Michael Famighetti: How did this book come about? It feels like…

The artist-activist Jesse Krimes’s practice draws attention to the injustice of the US prison system, in which he himself served five years. Krimes’s current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York puts his absorbing, ingenious installations in dialogue with the nineteenth-century photographs of the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. Your current exhibition, Corrections, explores themes of crime and punishment in your own work and in historical photographs. Where did the concept for this project begin? As I went through the Met’s collection, I came across Alphonse Bertillon’s photography, which pairs conceptually with my Purgatory series—prison-issued soaps with image transfers of offenders on them. It created an interesting foil to have these conversations around how media is used to construct basic societal norms about whom we deem valuable or…

Rineke Dijkstra The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra is renowned for her portraits of adolescents and people in states of duress or transition—bullfighters, club kids, army recruits, new mothers. Like Diane Arbus and August Sander, Dijkstra seeks a non-judgmental affinity with her subjects, who return her gaze with indelible precision. Her latest retrospective, presented by the Berlinische Galerie, covers more than three decades of photography and video and confirms her status as one of the greatest living portraitists. “Although my photographs are mostly portraits of individuals,” Dijkstra has said, “I like them to become more universal, like metaphors that can stand for an entire group.” Rineke Dijkstra at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, November 8, 2024–February 10, 2025 Letizia Battaglia Letizia Battaglia died in the spring of 2022, in Cefalù, close to Palermo,…

The “touching narcissism of the young”—that sympathetic yet condescending phrase feels dated today. Yet it’s how the writer Mavis Gallant described the Parisian student movement of May 1968. In Paris Notebooks (1986), which includes her journal of the events, she witnessed the crowd go silent as they listened to a radio broadcast about their very barricade on the rue de Rennes. Representations of protest are double-edged. They both communicate to the outside world the struggles, aims, ethos, and even aesthetics of a particular group and also provide an instance of self-reflection. Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print 1950–Present (2024), deftly edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, grapples with that dual nature. The book gathers a compelling selection of items from global protest movements since 1950, and will no doubt become…

IN TODAY’S HUMANITIES CLASSROOMS, THE GRAVEST anxiety stems not from the relentless corporatization of universities, or even the end of the English major, but rather from students’ nefarious use of artificial intelligence. The kids are liars, cheaters, and dumber than ever, my professorial colleagues shout, if not in so many words. AI is often polarizing: all good or all bad. In everyday life, though, many of us use AI without even knowing it: navigation, fraud-detection services, social media feeds. To demonstrate Silicon Valley’s ironclad control over these technologies, many artists have been using AI to disrupt this kind of Manichaean thinking, looking deeply into the mirror that algorithmic hegemony holds up to our unequal society. The New York–based artist and researcher Minne Atairu came to her AI work in 2020…

SPIRITS, MONKEYS, AND OSCAR WILDE FORM A strange trinity. Close your eyes and you might imagine some fin de siècle late night in a smoky room, where a blindfolded Wilde excitedly channels spirit voices. Maybe a leashed macaque looks on skeptically. Surely absinthe is being consumed. I’m guessing, however, that the US Copyright Office’s regulatory guidance on generative artificial intelligence did not find its way into your vision. Yet somehow this triad forms the doctrinal basis for one of the most impactful and controversial sets of rules that body has promulgated in years: its guidance on how and when it will grant copyright registrations for works (including photographs) containing material generated by artificial intelligence. Wherever you might come out on that charged moral and policy question—the Copyright Office, incredibly, received…

ARGUMENTS ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ARE dizzying in their contradictions. AI is either a clever ruse or an adept mimic disseminating boring parlor tricks at scale while eroding the value of artists’ labor. Or AI is the future, offering solutions to every social problem imaginable. Or AI is an inconceivably powerful toddler with devastating environmental costs. Over the past ten years, we’ve watched AI images—the machine learning artifacts we encounter most days—evolve in technical and aesthetic complexity. They bloom fractals of new theoretical fields, each with their own (often competing) lexicons and analogies. Our feeds offer up head-spinning encounters with synthetic images and media, each one often underpinned by an unknown—the hazy sense of a process just beyond, an elusive logic, a design guided by a set of economic and political…

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” Diane Arbus famously observed. Part of the secret, or mystery, of photographs is that a machine does part of the work, sometimes leaving a trace or an effect that shapes the meaning and aesthetic, a welcome accident, a date stamp, a haptic Polaroid frame. The evolution of the medium is bound to an evolution of technology. Along the way, the field has found itself at various crossroads that reset the rules of engagement, or at least required close examination, reflection, and some adaptability: The invention of the Kodak No. 1 camera. The advent of digital. The rise of the smartphone. Social media’s dizzying economy of images. The reverberations of these shifts are profound—for…

RUGGED CLOTHES, SKIN WRINKLED BEFORE ITS time, eyes draped in steeply raked shadows—the unnamed farmer on the previous page aggregates all the features of a vintage Dorothea Lange photograph. The off-kilter image, cream-colored mat, dark-brown card stock crowned with faint black type convey an origin in the files of the Library of Congress Farm Security Administration (FSA) collection. This description is true, intuitively and factually. But it is not the whole truth. The image is entirely the product of generative AI. Its appearance is vintage Lange; its essence is data visualization. The striking features of this image have nothing to do with the prompt we wrote to generate it. As with all the images in the first batch generated for this article, our prompt was simply “a photo of a…