Aperture Fall 2025

MNEMOSYNE ATLAS One of my all-time favorite artworks. Conceived by Aby Warburg in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death five years later, the Mnemosyne Atlas is a giant compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other images from across Western visual culture categorized and mounted on sixty-three panels, through which Warburg attempted to map the “afterlife of antiquity.” His project strikes me as something like an early internet search produced by one idiosyncratic mind. Warburg tries to be objective and comprehensive (the Atlas contains nearly a thousand images), and yet his work includes an enormous amount of personal decision making and subjective, enduring beauty. ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA The most kitsch object of all! The idea that you could distill all human knowledge into a single set…

E. TAMMY KIM (“K-Fragments,” page 100) is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers politics, labor, and the Koreas, among other topics. A former lawyer, Kim is also a Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center and a contributing editor at Lux. In this issue, Kim introduces a portfolio by the artist Chorong An. JEEHEY KIM (“Becoming Seoul,” page 46) is a writer, researcher, and curator focused on the history of visual culture in East Asia. An associate professor in the art history program at the University of Arizona, Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2023, she published Photography and Korea (2023), the first book on the history of…

Tyler Mitchell Growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell made skateboarding videos inspired by Spike Jonze and Ryan McGinley. After enrolling at New York University with plans to become a filmmaker, he began to make portraits full of energy, brash color, and sartorial panache, honing a signature look that landed him commissions for i-D and Vogue. This fall, Mitchell’s exhibition Wish This Was Real arrives in Paris after stops in Berlin, Helsinki, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Covering roughly a decade of image making, the show offers new perspectives on his abiding themes of masculinity, joy, and beauty. As the critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an accompanying monograph published by Aperture, “Mitchell’s work brilliantly reconceptualizes familiar spaces and teaches us that Black utopia has always been a place, constantly…

“I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with.”—William Eggleston Thirty years ago, an old-school, Magnum photographer came for a visit. He showed me a copy of his latest book. It was his first foray into color photography. Up to that point, he had been shooting in black and white professionally for four decades. I immediately noticed that every photograph had something red in it. It was as though he thought that if he loaded his camera with Kodachrome, he had to photograph something red. I also noticed that all of the reds in his pictures were, inexplicably, the exact same shade of red. Since I began working in color in 1971, I’ve been aware of technical and formal issues with the color red. Red objects sometimes…

Someday, the place we now refer to as the US-Mexico border will cease to exist. I make this audacious statement with confidence gleaned from studying the historical record. Political borders throughout North America have been unstable since the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, and I see no reason why the territorial configuration we have now will exist in perpetuity. The border of today, of course, unlike the many colonial divisions that came before, is also a massive construction site, a ribbon of megaprojects that have scarred the western deserts and destroyed much of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. In many cases, the built environment of the nearly two-thousand-mile international divide has overtaken the natural world. It has also structured the way we think and eroded our imaginations, precluding more…

On an early spring day, rare with sunshine, I arrived at a building of artists’ studios located between London Fields Overground rail station and the gates to the East London park of the same name. The spot is emblematic of how the London district of Hackney, a compound of advanced gentrification and the residue of straitened circumstances, now operates: A young mother holding a coffee cup in one hand pushes a pram with the other. A cycle courier leans against the park railings, smoking weed. A man on his phone strides by in designer sneakers. A car blasting its radio turns the corner. A child screams for a dropped lollipop. I’m here to see Nigel Shafran, an artist-photographer who has built a career on being observant of the patterns of…