Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i Aperture

TANISHA C. FORD (“Liberated Threads,” page 36) is a Harlem-based writer, researcher, and a professor of history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. As the guest editor of this issue, Ford has curated a range of portfolios, essays, and interviews exploring how contemporary image makers are remixing and reimagining what she terms “soul style”—a worldwide movement that fused fashion and self-expression with Black freedom in the 1960s and 1970s, and the subject of her book Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (2015), from which this issue takes its title. Ford’s other books include Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019) and Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (2023). “I wanted…

Jack Davison’s nervy portraits of notables revel in off-kilter composition and dramatic chiaroscuro. Rough-hewed yet seductive, celebrities before his lens appear not as chiseled figures of improbable perfection but rather ghostly presences that recall a Weegee fun-house-mirror image or the psychological introspection of an early Ingmar Bergman film. Davison lives in London and shoots regularly for The New York Times Magazine and British Vogue, and for a range of fashion brands such as the Row and Margaret Howell, all of which seek out his peculiar but beguiling way of seeing things. A. K. BLAKEMORE I discovered the author A. K. Blakemore quite by accident when a new literary magazine called Footnote asked me to create work in reaction to her text. Amy’s writing is beautiful, visceral, and urgent, and I…

The photograph sneaks up on me. A Black girl with a platinum-blonde buss down wig, her face slightly cocked, a closed invitation. We might as well not exist. She is lined up backstage with another woman like her, matching in Mowalola T-shirts emblazoned with the word ebony in bold capitalized letters, fishnet tights, and black thongs. Their location is indistinct, a fashion show or a nightclub or both, but this image, taken behind the curtain in the fever of preparation, nudges at a memory I believed lost. It brings to mind East London underground raves and sweaty red-light basements, afterparties in someone’s Camberwell flat dancing till midafternoon, running to catch the 185 bus home afterward, spent but satisfied. And I think only Liz Johnson Artur can do this—the photograph’s subtle…

A slinky crease of a jacket, a streetlight lurking in the background, marbles resting in the scoop of a collarbone, flowers forming a shadow on a model’s face. These intense details of light, shape, and form heighten an atmosphere of crepuscular intimacy in the brooding and buoyant images of Nuits Balnéaires, a photographer, musician, filmmaker, poet, and set designer based in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast. Nuits Balnéaires’s interest in photography can be traced back to some high school modeling he did casually for friends. “In that age, it was the boom of Facebook,” he told me recently. “It was all about doing cool photos for social media.” When his mother came back from a trip with a compact Sony camera, he began to make his own pictures. This eventually led him…

“My films are for audiences who have yet to be born,” Ja’Tovia Gary sometimes says. Gary, born in Dallas and now based in Atlanta, makes cinematic poems that interweave archival and contemporary images in an attempt to recast narratives around Black histories and futures. Her breakout work, The Giverny Document (2019), alternates footage of the artist walking through Monet’s canonical garden with recordings of Nina Simone, the activist Fred Hampton, on-the-street interviews in Harlem, and police brutality, forming a dense, associative tapestry about the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Fatima Jamal also confronts the gaze placed on the Black female body. An Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose practice spans filmmaking, writing, activism, and modeling—she’s walked runways for labels such as Telfar and Random Identities—Jamal is perhaps best known for…

When did you first read Bonjour Tristesse? Did it strike a chord with you then? I can’t remember when I first encountered Bonjour Tristesse, but it wasn’t one of those books for me, the kind that changes your insides. I think it was a sweet escape at the time. (And escape holds plenty of value!) Of course, since rereading it nearly ten years ago, when this project started, my relationship to the book has changed. It holds the key to a lot. In some ways, it’s a very simple story with a very complicated heart. In that way, it continues to grow on me and provides new points of entry. It’s always been a book with some of my favorite themes: father-daughter relationships, women influencing women, summer doom. What was…

Wolfgang Tillmans The name Wolfgang Tillmans more readily evokes nightclubs and day-long raves of the sort he chronicled in the 1990s than the hushed environs of a library. But this summer, the German photographer is taking over the bibliothèque of the Centre Pompidou, which will go dark in September for a five-year renovation. Given carte blanche, the artist will bring together photographs, videos, music, text, and archival material to transform the mostly empty, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot Public Information Library into a node of epistemological inquiry and Tillmansesque togetherness. Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 13–September 22, 2025 Stan Douglas Stan Douglas produces painstakingly composed “speculative histories” that trouble the…

Every time I step inside Bharat Sikka’s studio, in Dhan Mill compound in Chhatarpur, located off one of New Delhi’s busiest arterial roads, I feel like I have entered the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The space is a unique bubble with immersive energy—albeit without the sinister vibes of the Russian master’s imagination—an incubator of creativity, where the laws of everyday life are suspended. The studio feels fitting for a charismatic photographer known internationally for a restless range of work including magazine editorials, a long-term personal project on the complexities of fatherhood, and his own publishing initiatives that support the work of others. A converted warehouse with high ceilings, Sikka’s studio is cavernous and gray, with an outer room as large as a factory floor. This is his “research studio,”…

Guest Editor’s Note Tanisha C. Ford considers the ongoing work of style, self-expression, and political change. MELANIN ABUNDANT. THE DARK LENSES OF SOUTH African activist Amonge Sinxoto’s Black Vibe Tribe sunglasses obscure her eyes. The message, written on the frames in white block text, speaks for her. Sinxoto’s pride is so uncontainable it bursts through her dermis. Holy Ghost dances on her melanated skin. It’s an offering. We give thanks. The Kenyan-born, Johannesburg-based Cedric Nzaka (who runs everydaypeoplestories, the popular photography blog) snapped this image of Sinxoto at the 2018 Afropunk music festival in Joburg. By composing the portrait around Sinxoto’s face, Nzaka enunciates the power of Black abundance. It’s in the architectural baby hairs, the Senegalese twists that expand into a low Afro puff ponytail, dainty pearl earrings, and…

Nikki Nelms lifts hair to the level of conceptual art. In one indelible look, a zipper runs down the middle of a French roll, and who knows what kind of goodies are inside. “The zipper style was my nod to the ’90s, Detroit, down south Miami, and hair competitions,” Nelms told me recently. “Back in the day, they would add color sprays to a French roll, or trinkets. It was the ’90s, so you had to go crazy on the French roll.” It’s no wonder that 1997’s B.A.P.S. (Black American Princesses) is one of her favorite movies. “B.A.P.S. was so iconic because those styles were considered ghetto and hood—as are a lot of things we do—until it’s mainstream, and then it’s chic and high fashion.” With collaborators who span the…

In a photograph taken by Devin Allen, a woman stands against a brick wall, light bouncing off her darkened puffer coat. With the subject’s gaze averted from the camera, the image reads as Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) reimagined. The covered head of the sitter in the painting is swapped for Bantu knots. The luminescent bauble of Vermeer’s painting is replaced by a large disk stating “BLACK LIVES MATTER” beside a raised fist. “Apparel is a part of that whole activation,” Allen said of his observations of style within the protests he has documented. “‘I’m going to wear my pain, in a sense. I’m going to wear what I stand for.’” In addition to his decade-long commitment to photographing social justice movements, this image also demonstrates Allen’s…

“This is not a bookshop,” Atsushi Hamanaka told me recently, as he stood between thousands of books that line the dramatic scaffolding structure of a new multipurpose art center in Kameari, on the outskirts of east Tokyo. Hamanaka is the founder of Twelvebooks, a distributor that recently moved its entire operations, including around eighty thousand books, into this new warehouse. Visitors can purchase books here, but that isn’t the primary aim. It is more akin to a library or a factory floor, with staff zipping around to check stock or package up the latest order. “Our main intention is to use this space as a warehouse, but we organized it in a way that accommodates visitors,” said Hamanaka. “Art books are often thought of as ‘nonessential’ or ‘niche items for…

In a spare, domestic tableau, a bare-chested older man sits pensively on the edge of a nightstand. He looks down at a white bird resting on his hand as a lamp casts light across his body and an empty mattress. Above the bed, a small wooden frame holds a painting of an angel. The figures within this image—man, bird, angel—permeate Alana Perino’s Pictures of Birds (2017–24), an elegiac series of photographs that searches for meaning in memory and mortality. Perino, who was born in New York and raised by separated parents, finds home in many places. In 2020, they moved to live with their father, Joe, and stepmother, Letty, on the small Floridian island known as Longboat Key. Perino had begun to photograph their family in the Longboat Key condo…

A YOUNG WOMAN GAZES CONFIDENTLY AT THE camera, her black hair adorned with white cowrie shells; a man poses in a sharply tailored suit and glasses, embodying an elegance that is at once African and European. The act of sitting for a portrait in Seydou Keïta’s studio was a quiet but deliberate assertion of identity in a heady age of self-determination. Taken mostly between the late 1940s and 1960s, Keïta’s portraits are master classes in texture and composition. His studio—located on land his father gave him behind a prison in the Malian capital city of Bamako—welcomed a diverse range of visitors after its 1948 opening, from government officials, traders, and intellectuals to artists and everyday members of Mali’s rising middle class. Some went to the studio for professional pictures; others…

Melina Matsoukas has made a lasting mark on visual culture as the director of unforgettable music videos—among them Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and Beyoncé’s “Formation”—and the 2019 feature film Queen & Slim, which bends the romance outlaw genre into an utterly contemporary meditation on police brutality and Black love. In some ways, though, it feels like Matsoukas is just getting started. The Los Angeles–based polymath is currently developing a flurry of passion projects (the only projects she does), among them adapting a legendary female mobster’s life for the screen and documenting her own experience as a new mother. On top of everything, Matsoukas also runs De La Revolución, a bicoastal collective of photographers and directors that she founded in 2021 as an alternative to exploitative models of inclusion in the…

As a stylist, editor, and éminence grise, Yashua Simmons is an influential force in the worlds of fashion and photography. Whether he’s creating looks for celebrities such as Travis Scott, Laverne Cox, and Lana Del Rey or paying homage to his own father as he rides through Yonkers on horseback, Simmons approaches his shoots with a novelist’s flair for scene, working with a close-knit network of photographers to craft moments of beauty that often tell stories the fashion industry has long ignored or dismissed. “My process in making pictures isn’t only about clothes,” said Simmons, whose work has graced the covers of magazines including Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue and the pages of many more. “It’s really about the 360—the who, what, where, when, why. If I’m dressing someone,…