Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i Aperture

VINCE ALETTI (“Good Vibrations,” page 150) is a critic, curator, and collector living in Manhattan. Between 1972 and 1978, Aletti wrote an influential weekly column on the fledgling disco scene for Record World magazine, and between 1987 and 2005 was art editor and photography critic for The Village Voice. A regular contributor to Aperture and The New Yorker, he is the author of the books Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines (2019) and The Drawer (2022), which won the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2023. Physique, a book showcasing more than 250 rare physique photographs from Aletti’s storied collection, was published in 2025. In this issue, Aletti writes on the early work of the fashion photographer Mark Borthwick. DAN BEACHY-QUICK (“Treasure Island,” page 130) is…

If one thing defines the work of Karim Kal, it’s the rich and varied blackness that has seeped into most of his photographs from the past ten years. That blackness carries, all at once, Kal’s formal, conceptual, and critical intentions. It is literally the blackness of a landscape at night, but it also resembles pools of ink or the deep stare of some Nietzschean abyss. It is an element of abstraction, an aesthetic tool connecting Kal to a lineage of visual thinkers from Kazimir Malevich to Kerry James Marshall. Blackness overwhelms whole portions of a given photograph while allowing streams of artificial light to reveal, for example, a mountain ridge, roadside signage, graffiti, plants, the edge of a terrace, or a dubious fluid leaked onto a darkened asphalt. In one…

“Craft is an insistence on the hand,” Aspen Mays, whose photogram appears on our cover, observed when we spoke with her about this issue. She makes her cameraless images in the darkroom, guided by sense memory and experimentation—photographic paper is handled like a textile, folded, ripped, applied with dye, or hole-punched into playful patterns. If photography tends to rely on a machine, underpinned by ideas of reproducibility and standardization, the artists here push against the gears to insist on manual processes and unrepeatable forms. They are putting photography back in touch with, well, touch itself: with embodied practices and irregular surfaces, with carefully chosen materials and painstaking labor, with imperfection. They create with their hands, not just those fingertips at which every conceivable digital picture can now seemingly be summoned.…

WHEN THE ARTIST JUNGJIN LEE SAT DOWN ON THE floor to meditate on a spring afternoon in 2003, she did not know that the course of her career would change before she stood back up. Upon opening her eyes, she noticed a small clay pot on the bookshelf. It had been there for years, but suddenly, “it took me in a different way—just walking toward me,” Lee recalled on a sticky summer afternoon in her minimalist apartment and studio in Long Island City, Queens. “I wanted to express it in a picture.” That moment marked the genesis of Lee’s celebrated series Thing (2003–6), which is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Seoul Museum of Art. Throughout Thing,…

“I WANT TO TELL YOU THAT WE ARE ON UNFRIENDLY terms with her lately and that she has even brought or intends to bring a suit against Walter for having kept her Bauhaus photographs to himself. There are hard feelings on both sides,” wrote Ise Gropius, wife of Walter Gropius, the German architect and founder of the Bauhaus art and design school, in a 1956 letter to a friend who was hosting a dinner in his honor in London. Ise Gropius was eager to ensure that “she” would not be invited. “She” was Lucia Moholy, the Czech-born photographer whose mid-1920s images of the Bauhaus campus designed by Gropius in the German city of Dessau have long been regarded as archetypal depictions of the modernist aesthetic. Her precise, beautifully composed photographs…

“I am always resisting the rectangle as the way that a photograph has to be,” Erin Jane Nelson told me recently. A multimedia image maker in the broadest sense, she uses everything from scanners to glazed ceramics to produce her misshapen organic forms. On quilted fabrics stretched over frames, Nelson embeds her own photographs—pandemic-era streetscapes, Polaroids made in her twenties, ones she recently shot on 35mm film—within an eclectic mix of colors and textures. She also scavenges pictures from vintage zines published by feminist groups and utopian communes. The act of stretching distorts and flattens her composites into difficult-to-categorize organisms. Nelson, who was raised in Atlanta, is no stranger to the art world. She attended Cooper Union, in New York, and after returning to Atlanta was a curatorial assistant of…

Michella Bredahl Having begun a modeling career at fourteen years old, Michella Bredahl felt the intrusions of a camera’s gaze early on. By contrast, her own portraits of young women, many with unstable upbringings that mirror her own, are grounded in trust and collaboration. In the Danish photographer and filmmaker’s first museum exhibition, portraits of pole dancers, new mothers, artistic peers, and chosen family derive their strength from displays of unguarded tenderness. “She had a specific vulnerability,” Bredahl has said of Sybilla, a friend and recurring subject. “It’s as if there was always a tear in her eye.” Michella Bredahl: Rooms We Made Safe at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, October 18, 2025–February 8, 2026 Boris Mikhailov A towering figure in Ukrainian art, Boris Mikhailov fully embraced photography after being fired from…

The day I visited Jo Ractliffe in the coastal town of Fish Hoek on South Africa’s Cape Peninsula, low clouds obscured the valley over which her house looks, eclipsing any view of the expansive bay. In summer, and in the absence of the season’s infamous gale-force southeaster, the setting is idyllic. The town, however, is something of a suburban oddity. Once intended as a residential holiday resort, and historically dry (an obscure bylaw proscribed the sale of alcohol within its limits until recently), Fish Hoek has God and secondhand goods in surplus, with sixteen churches and half as many thrift stores. When Ractliffe moved there a decade ago, the population was neatly summarized in rhyme: “for newlyweds and nearly deads.” She was neither. The demographic has since shifted, with the…

“I’m tired of either/or,” says Theaster Gates, the art world’s multi-tasker par excellence. Artist, urban planner, activist, potter, archivist, gospel singer, and much else—the eminent Chicagoan has spent his career embodying the possibilities of both/and. Uniting Gates’s efforts is a commitment to harnessing the energy of everyday materials, as exemplified by his idea of Afro-Mingei: a fusion of African American history and identity with the Japanese philosophy of mingei, which celebrates the beauty of functional objects handcrafted by anonymous artisans. Whether making installations, ceramics, or places, Gates has refused to pit craftsmanship and conceptual art against each other. For him, the lives of ordinary things are an essential thing of life. “Can we learn to love to do things excellently?” With this question top of mind, Gates recently spoke with…

Like many analog photographers, Aspen Mays makes images in a darkroom. But unlike most of them, she doesn’t use a camera and film. She creates her photograms in complete darkness, without even the red glow of the safelight. For hours, she works with eyes unseeing and often closed, guided by muscle memory, touch, and the sound of dripping water. In the dark, Mays reaches for objects she arranged in the light. Her fingers find the taped lines on the table directing her to materials. She creases photographic paper, invents celestial patterns with a hole punch, and layers and removes tape to form sunbursts and spiderwebs. “I’ve always been interested in uniqueness,” Mays said, “working with base materials that rely on hand processes.” Such an embodied approach requires endurance, which in…

BEFORE TROY MONTES MICHIE BECAME AN ARTIST, his grandmother’s living room had already awakened him to the power of image-making. In her Texas home, photographs of family members past and present festooned mantles and shelves. In his grandmother’s closet, Montes Michie learned what it meant to self-fashion, to adorn one’s image through the art of stylization. Growing up surrounded by all of this lovingly arranged stuff of the everyday, Montes Michie’s artistic imagination erupted with a commitment to the decorative, to the slightly kitsch edges of the domestic, and to a distinctly lived-in aesthetic. It was through this alchemy of the home that Montes Michie’s eye arrived at a trenchant desire for beauty: “It happened quite early on,” he said. “I was always a strange kid, an old soul, and…

Some three hundred years ago, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico came to a humble conclusion that still startles today—that one can understand only what one makes. Perhaps it’s true to say that the claim grows only more astonishing as the centuries accrue and technology evolves at such a breakneck pace that very few, if any of us, make anything for ourselves anymore. The paradox baffles the mind (or does so if we take Vico at his word): in the twenty-first century, when any one of us has in the palm of our hand all the knowledge the world possesses, we are secretly immersed in a new dark age. We know it all, but we understand none of it. The “cloud” memorizes the images we take, a strange archive of experiences…

Mark Borthwick’s ‘Out of Date’: Pola Pan 1984–1996 (Rizzoli, 2025; 384 pages, $135) is a terrific mess, as off-putting as it is irresistible. A fat slab of a book, it combines an archive of images made between 1984 and 1996 (the earliest before he had anything like a career in photography) with diary “extracts” from 1978 to 1996. All the pictures were made using PolaPan, a 35mm instant Polaroid film that gave him uniquely textured black-and-white images that feel experimental and hint at sensations beyond the visual. In a 2016 Artforum interview, he said, “None of it was intentional. That’s the way I’ve lived life, in a way: doing a lot of things really quietly without specifically trying to recognize what I was doing—trying to let it remain a question without…

SADE WITH MIRROR Growing up, a fixture in our living room was my mother’s dual-cassette boom box. In constant rotation was Sade’s 1984 album, Diamond Life. It shaped my understanding of Sade as this mythic artist whose reclusive coolness transcended her music. Sade with Mirror (1983) by the photographer Graham Smith is one of those rare portraits for the ages. It’s executed to perfection—an extremely graphic distillation of the spirit of the subject. In my own studio work, I often return to this photograph, hoping to harness a bit of its magic. FASE In her 1982 piece Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker employs a minimalist set where the illumination of two suspended fixtures generates striking shadows on a stark…

The headquarters of the fashion brand Lemaire occupies a handsome seventeenth-century building, formerly the Hôtel Pierrard, on Place des Vosges in the Marais district of Paris. The square was built to order for King Henri IV, who intended to revive the French economy by stimulating domestic silk production to overshadow the fashion for French nobles to wear clothes made in the finest Italian fabrics. The grand project did not come to fruition (the silkworms perished in the Parisian winters, forcing the sericulture industry to move south to Lyon), but the covered arcades that grace the north and south sides of the square soon became the most coveted site in Paris to be seen promenading in the latest fashions. Lemaire’s creative codirectors, Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran, acknowledge the history of…

“You never find treasure on a mowed lawn,” Mark Steinmetz once remarked, describing his attraction to dog-eared, slightly peripheral American places, often in the South. Before his lens, everyday moments are frozen with a dollop of stylized romance and melancholy worthy of 1960s French cinema. Irina Rozovsky, too, seeks out moments of quiet contemplation—parkgoers in Brooklyn basking in magic-hour light, still lifes from the Balkans. She has also experimented with presentation, displaying her photographs in intimately scaled decorative frames purchased from eBay. Steinmetz and Rozovsky are partners in life—with a young daughter, Amelia—and they are partners running The Humid, a photography project in Athens, Georgia, offering workshops, lectures, and traditional analog training. Here, they talk with Michael Famighetti, Aperture’s editor in chief, about alternative approaches to teaching the craft of…

In the 1990s, a group of African writers and curators began to stage exhibitions that would inspire a surge of worldwide interest in photography from the continent. Their goal was to turn away from the “ethnographic lens”—the news imagery of famine and war that dominated media coverage of Africa—in favor of the artistic voices that defined African photography, from the gracious studio portraiture of mid-century Mali to the poetic, long-form reportage of David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng in South Africa. The late curator Okwui Enwezor, who cofounded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, once said that publishing is a space “in which thinking could be elaborated.” Enwezor produced some of the era’s totemic exhibitions and catalogs, while the curators Bisi Silva and Koyo Kouoh built institutions for contemporary art—Center for Contemporary…