Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2015 en Aperture

From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada delivering an ever-evolving slide show, Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present, more affectionately known as the “Dyke Show.” Over the course of two and a half hours, JEB narrated and presented more than three hundred images to women who gathered in church basements, community centers, women’s bookstores, and coffeehouses, eager for, as Carol Seajay, cofounder of San Francisco’s Old Wives Tales feminist bookstore and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, put it in an early review, “Images I had never seen before, images I had seen and not perceived. Images on which to build a future.” The slide show was designed to grow over the years, as JEB added new pictures by…

On the occasion of South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s 2014 exhibition Of Love and Loss, at Johannesburg’s Stevenson Gallery, a writer for the local Sunday Independent commented that “simply standing in front of Muholi’s camera lens is subversive.” For more than a decade, Muholi, who self-identifies as a photographer and an activist (she founded the media advocacy group Inkanyiso in 2009), has committed her career to creating a visual record of black lesbians in her home country. Although South Africa legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, discrimination and violence against queer women remain widespread. Muholi studied photography at the Market Photo Workshop, a photography school, gallery, and project space founded by David Goldblatt in 1989, and presented her first show, Visual Sexuality, in Johannesburg as part of the school’s 2004 Urban…

One of China’s most distinctive young photographers, Ren Hang makes cool, saturated images that are tightly composed and lit with stark flash. Prominently featuring red lips, black hair, and supple flesh, his photography creates a world where sex, desire, and the joy of voyeurism create a visceral effect. Although most of his recent solo exhibitions have been held outside of China, viewers have gravitated toward his work when it has appeared in group shows in Beijing and Shanghai. Born in 1987, Ren Hang left his home in Changchun city in Northern China to study advertising at the Communication University of China in Beijing. He began photographing his friends as an escape from the tedium of class. Using a small Minolta point-and-shoot camera, Ren Hang acts as director, moving hands and…

When asked to select a photographer for this “Queer” issue of Aperture, I knew I wanted to introduce someone I had recently discovered. Through my work as a publisher supporting emerging fine-art photographers for the last ten years, while also publishing queer magazines, I have come to know a strong community of queer artists whom I love and have worked with over the years. Now I get to introduce someone new. I learned of Nitzan Krimsky last summer, and immediately fell in love with his story and his work. Nitzan began to take photographs on a whim fourteen years ago in his hometown of Tel Aviv, and later attended photography school in Milan, slowly establishing himself as a photographer. Back then he was a she— but always felt like a…

Stefan Sagmeister The last big photobook I bought was Martin Schoeller’s Identical, which must be his most significant work yet. Martin’s hyperrealism proves particularly effective when applied to the subjects of twins and triplets. The act of comparison becomes the main modus of communication between the photographs and the viewer. Every pore acquires significance, every scar tells a story of different lives lived. His portraits of twins tip the debate over nature versus nurture clearly toward the former. Stefan Sagmeister has worked for the Rolling Stones, the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He is founding partner of Sagmeister & Walsh. David Reinfurt This photograph by Lily Healey embeds multiple times and, since hanging it in my hallway, it keeps me thinking. In January 2013,…

Vince Aletti The first queer photograph I ever saw excited and confused me. It was at a newsstand in the Jersey Shore town where my family spent the week of my father’s summer vacation, sometime in the late ’50s. Tucked between bodybuilder magazines like Strength & Health were some pocket-sized pamphlets with nearly naked men on their covers and titles like Tomorrow’s Man, Body Beautiful, and Fizeek. In one of them, I came across a picture of two dark-eyed young guys—they looked like regulars on Bandstand—in nothing but stripped-down jock straps, one slung across the other’s shoulder like a trophy. It was titled Victor and Vanquished, and I stared at it, mesmerized, until my mother called me away. I had no words for what that picture meant, certainly no classical…

My first introduction to the world of queer zines was a brief 2001 article I read about BUTT magazine in the iconic but now defunct culture bible, The Face. The article, about BUTT’s inaugural issue, featured the fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm (then very baby-faced) on the cover, shot by Wolfgang Tillmans. At the time I was a young gay man obsessed with art, fashion, and music, living in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, and disenchanted with being unable to connect with other queer creative, underground types. A friend in London mailed me a copy of BUTT’s second issue after months of fruitless searching on my own. The magazine was a revelation: The interviews, articles, and photographic spreads were by and about queer artists, writers, and musicians. This thoughtfully designed, pink-hued…

Exploring what remains of the American landscape—while using an antiquated photographic process that relies on light and chemicals to produce a print—is David Benjamin Sherry’s fool’s errand. Of course, landscape is not disappearing, nor is photography, but both of these “endangered territories” are undergoing acute alteration caused by manic human industry and technological advancement. One might imagine such pictures to be dark, dour, bleak, accusatory. But no, they are happy, sunny, druggy, romantic. Sherry’s photographs capture faintly eroticized, dewy, and transcendent beauty in a climate of extinction. They are the painted face of Candy Darling, Warhol’s muse, on her deathbed, exaltedly lovely at her greatest moment of tragedy. The allusion is not random, for Sherry’s colors—ochre, magenta, cerulean— are quietly flamboyant. Not Jeff Koons– flamboyant, offering every flavor in a…

Dean Sameshima’s art yearns to grab a past era by its tail. Glamorous ghosts from 1970s soft- and harder-core porn appear in his large-scale, silkscreened canvases of appropriated photographs, organized in series with titles such as Young Men at Play and Cruise or Be Cruised. Most of the men in his images are anonymous, like the sex they offer. They embody ideals of sexual abandon rather than affectionate intimacy, yet Sameshima approaches this idyllic decadence from a distance. Through silk-screening, using archival material, and transforming small-scale and privately viewed images into grand and public statements, he documents his own personal longing for an era of burgeoning liberation and seemingly extreme thrills for gay men. When Sameshima first encountered his source images, AIDS had already altered the nature of gay identity…

“Sometimes I think I’d rather be a movie star than an artist.” —Mark Morrisroe Following are some facts about Mark Morrisroe. He was born in 1959 in Malden, Massachusetts, son of Patricia, father unknown. He created the punk zine Dirt with his school friend Lynelle White. In 1976 he was shot. He walked with a noticeable limp. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1978 Morrisroe became romantically involved with Jack Pierson (Jonathan at the time) and was part of a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and performers that included Pat Hearn and Stephen Tashjian (aka Taboo!). In 1984 he moved to New York City (or more accurately, Jersey City). He tested positive for HIV in 1986. He spent his last summer with his partner,…

In 1977, San Francisco photographer Hal Fischer produced his photo-text project Gay Semiotics, a seminal examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of cruising gay men in the Castro district of San Francisco. Fischer’s pictures dissected the significance of colored bandannas worn in jeans pockets, as well as how the placement of keys and earrings might telegraph passive or active roles. He also photographed a series of “gay looks”—from hippie to leather to cowboy to jock—with text that pointed out key elements of queer street-style. Begun as a series of large prints and then collected in a book published by NFS Press, Fischer’s project was both a serious study of vernacular queer behavior as well as an irreverent take on structuralism. For this issue, art historian Julia…

Sam Wagstaff, known most conspicuously as the lover, mentor, and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe, was a man of many distinctions: He was one of the earliest photography collectors; he played a seminal role in elevating photography’s status to the realm of fine art; and he was instrumental in establishing the art market for photography (for better or worse). Before he turned to photography in 1973, his credentials had been firmly established as an influential curator of painting and sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, where he organized the first museum show of minimal art, in 1964, and, later, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he gave Michael Heizer, one of the earliest and most significant land artists, his first museum show. Wagstaff was fifty and Mapplethorpe twenty-five…

The photography, video, and performance works of Lyle Ashton Harris are situated at the intersection of autobiography and historiography. Harris’s work became indispensable to the discourse of identity politics in the United States through his participation in the 1994 landmark Whitney Museum show Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art. The exhibition catalog memorably juxtaposed two minimalist black-and-white photographs of nudes on facing pages: a graceful self-portrait of Harris’s toned, bare back, and an image by Robert Mapplethorpe with a full-frontal framing of an unidentified (black) man’s lower torso showing a well-endowed penis mounted on amply muscular legs. Curiously, it was the more ambivalent sexuality of Harris’s images that drew the harshest critical response from conservative African-American audiences, who focused on Harris over Mapplethorpe as a scapegoat for their…

In K8 Hardy’s Position Series Diptych (Right), 2011, the artist sits on a pile of seaside rubble. Legs spread eagle, she holds a piece of cut melon (or is it two halves of a salmon filet?) in front of her crotch. But this is not all. Superimposed onto this image is another: a close-up of a mannequin head sporting a blonde buzz cut, large round sunglasses, and a headband with the slogan: Feminismo sin mujeres (Feminism without women). Hardy’s photograph is an excoriation of those who say we live in a “postfeminist” moment, when feminism’s goals have been accomplished, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that feminism is still urgent and essential. At the same time, Hardy’s photograph offers the utopic promise of a feminism that complicates its most basic…

A.L. Steiner’s standout contribution to the 2010 edition of MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition completely engulfed three walls of a natural light–filled room with a dense and raucous patchwork of photographs. Bodies piled on top of bodies—naked, proud, and perverted— posed for the camera. The space was filled with so much energy, and so much desire, that it seemed ready to split at its seams. This particular installation’s title sums up Steiner’s practice: Angry, Articulate, Inevitable. Using the same structural logic, the photo-collages on the following pages juxtapose pointed messages—“capitalism is terrorism!” “ We make babies too!” “That truck is on fire!”—against porous images that frame views and holes ready to be filled with our desires. In the ten-plus years I’ve known Steiner, we’ve found time to work, play,…