Inhaltsverzeichnis für Fall 2016 in Aperture

I remember the first William Eggleston photograph I ever saw, or the first that I knew was his, that it had been made by someone called “William Eggleston”—his images have percolated up into the culture so thoroughly, I guess it’s no longer possible to be an American without experiencing a few of them, if only as album covers (Big Star’s 1974 Radio City, most notably, but there are many), and certainly for anyone with the smallest interest in American art, it’s hard to avoid the name of a man whose work most credit with having legitimized color photography as an art form. Before Eggleston, there had been a sharp divide between black-and-white and color: artists used the former, tourists used the latter. After Eggleston, or with him, everything was altered.…

In recent years, the reputation of Katsumi Watanabe as an important Japanese street photographer who intimately captured Tokyo’s seedy underground culture of yakuza and prostitutes has been revived. Born in the city of Morioka, in Iwate Prefecture, in 1941, Watanabe discovered photography working by day at a local newspaper while finishing high school by night. After graduation, he got a job at Japanese National Railways but never stopped taking pictures, and ended up moving to Tokyo. He honed his craft while employed at a photography shop there until 1965, when he became a drifting shooter, offering three exposures for two hundred yen, paid the next day when he delivered the prints. Watanabe’s beat was the area around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, a district that rose from the darkness of the aftermath…

I knew that Malick Sidibe was unwell. An interview seemed out of the question; I couldn’t bear the idea of dragging the great photographer on a long and exhausting journey down memory lane through his work and life. Not now that the illness was transforming his body and mind progressively every day. But, hoping to get closer to Malick’s roots, I wanted to return to Soloba, the village in southwest Mali where he was raised, to look for testimonies or written accounts of his career that could compensate for the silence imposed by his failing health. I wondered what I might find: Traces of the colonial administrator who was the first to discover the talents of the young Malick at the very beginning of the 1950s, when the French still…

Joshua Chuang, a curator, is coeditor of the forthcoming Steidl book series Santu Mofokeng: Stories. “Sometime around midday, a shrill whistle sounded,” the anthropologist Deborah James writes of the rousing of a Pedi dance performance in Songs of the Women Migrants (1999), her study on this endangered yet continuously evolving South African tradition. “Individual men dressed in everyday clothes,” she continues, “dislodged themselves from groups of drinkers sitting around in makeshift bars on tins under tattered plastic shading, and grouped themselves on one side of the drummers who began to play a set of hide-covered drums.” The men started to blow vigorously on aluminum pipes hanging from their necks, producing a rhythmical sequence of sounds, and, in coordinated fashion, stamped one foot after another on the dusty ground. Santu Mofokeng’s…

Michael Schmelling grew up in River Forest, a near suburb of Chicago. But his first concert, in 1985, was across the state line in Merrillville, Indiana, at the Holiday Star Theatre. His older sister took him to see Corey Hart, the Canadian heartthrob known for “Sunglasses at Night.” He was ten years old, and he enjoyed the frenzy. “It was screaming girls, and this girl clawed my arm with her nails,” he says. “It was fun.” He went back to the Holiday Star not long afterward, to see Violent Femmes, the barbed Milwaukee postpunk band, having had his musical tastes permanently altered by a hip friend at summer camp who shared a cassette. “I’d never heard a song with the word fuck in it before, so it blew my mind,”…

For three decades, Stan Douglas has probed cultural and historical moments with exceptional specificity and lush atmosphere. Working in large-scale photography, video, and installation, the Vancouver-based artist wields a strong directorial hand to reanimate and reimagine the past, while maintaining remarkable fidelity through costuming, scene setting, and production design. References to cultural scenes defined by music serve as touchstones in his complex works. For Disco Angola (2012), Douglas adopted the role of a fictional photojournalist covering both the downtown New York 1970s disco scene, in an era of urban decline, and the fraught postcolonial moment in Angola, after the Portuguese ceded control. Douglas describes this unlikely pairing of subjects as a “highly subjective connection.” A 1992 work, Hors-champs, took on jazz as its subject. Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), a marathon, six-hour film,…

Wojciech Zamecznik, Light drawing, study for the design of an album cover, 1963 Light shining in black on a white ground; black circles, which leave a white trace on paper— transformations that Zamecznik developed to create a visual equivalent of contemporary music. Two great passions of this architect and graphic designer meet: music and photography, which, in dialogue with graphic design, became his trademark. What can we see under half-closed eyes while listening to Penderecki, Lutosławski, or Bacewicz? A thing becomes its opposite, a single line transforms into fog, a sequence of rhythms. — Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator of Photographs, Centre Pompidou Harold E. Edgerton, Antique Gun Firing, 1936 Science during wartime changes art during peacetime. Such is the history of the electronic strobe light in the hands of artist-engineer Harold…

His subjects are judges, men who train hyenas, Liberian Boy Scouts, Ghanaian trash collectors, denizens of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, and himself. With unsparing detail, Pieter Hugo—who was born in Johannesburg and graduated from high school in 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic presidential election—has pushed photojournalism into the realm of trenchant social critique. Known for Nollywood (2009), a glossy send-up of Nigeria’s film industry, his recent series, Kin, published by Aperture in 2015, turns to communities close to home with a steady, psychologically curious gaze. “I think it comes out of living in such a strange and peculiar place as South Africa,” Hugo has said. “So much of it is about trying to figure out where to situate yourself in your environment.” J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999…

Of our five senses, we’ve only worked out how to record two: sight and sound. In the span of half a century, a pair of inventions generated the first durable, reproducible impressions of visible and audible perceptions. The reverberations of their original names—photograph, phonograph—remind us of their parallel ambitions: to write with light, to write with sound. As physical objects, they’ve each taken efficient and elegant forms, most often as flattened surfaces embedded with traces of things outside of themselves. Yet their fundamental operations are by definition inaccessible to the other. Sound is invisible, still images silent. They are, to use musical metaphors, harmonious and discordant at the same time. The friction in this—their obvious resonances and blunt boundaries—has sparked a fascination in photography with making the objects and operations…

Vinca Petersen didn’t set out to be a photographer. Her pictures began as a visual diary, documenting her leaving home at the age of seventeen, moving into a London squat, and becoming involved in the free party scene that blossomed across Europe in the 1990s. She has built up an impressive archive that records the techno-fueled raves and the lives of the travelers who organized them, but she started taking pictures primarily as a way of recording her own life, preserving her memories of the parties, memories which otherwise—as anyone who has danced all night will know—tend to become a bit blurry. In the U.K., free parties grew out of the rave explosion of 1989, when crowds of up to twenty-five thousand people would gather in the English countryside for…