Inhaltsverzeichnis für Spring 2022 in Aperture

In 1811, when the Commissioners’ Plan established the map that was to dictate Manhattan’s development north of Houston Street, city fathers settled on the gridiron as the ideal form not for its Euclidean elegance but for the sake of rank commerce: “Right angled houses are the most cheap to build,” they declared. Meanwhile, in the city that already existed, streets slouched and coiled like vagabonds, their winding shapes defined by rivers, shorelines, swamps, and large rocks. Among these vintage arteries, Doyers Street, a narrow, two-hundred-foot dogleg angling between the Bowery and Pell Street, is unlike any other. The crime journalist Herbert Asbury, who covered downtown New York, once called it “a crazy street” and said “there has never been any excuse for it.” Turning onto it feels like stumbling into…

This year, Aperture, founded in 1952, turns seventy. That the magazine has managed to consistently publish for seven decades is a milestone, a minor miracle, a testament to the indefatigable spirit and stubborn will of its staff over those decades. Given this anniversary, it seemed fitting to delve into our archive—a resource of inspiration and instruction—to revisit some earlier themes of the magazine. In doing so, one stood out—admittedly, an idiosyncratic issue from 1974 titled “Celebrations.” “Today, there is a great need for emphasizing the climactic affirmations of life’s events and feelings,” the preface states, arguing for photography, a medium that inherently embodies a close read of the world, to do just that. “A photograph that celebrates is an affirmation of existence,” the editors proclaim, and this affirmation of life…

In October last year, three days before I began writing this piece, I had my first proper dance in twenty months. I live in London where, after lockdown, clubs reopened in July 2021. I was fortyseven at the time, now forty-eight, and don’t go out so much anymore. I also happen to co-run a queer rave with two friends, a party we’ve been organizing since 2013 called Chapter 10. In prepandemic times, we did seven or eight a year. A benefit of running a party: I can dance without the hang-ups that can come from entering someone else’s space. I can think. At Chapter 10, on Saturday night into Sunday morning, my thinking was all about openness and possibilities and creative energy. If I look back over the past thirty…

The artist Shikeith, born in Philadelphia, in 1989, as Shikeith Cathey, now goes by just his first name. But that does not mean that he is without antecedents, without family, or without history. With interdisciplinary work spanning photography, installation, film, and sculpture, Shikeith’s practice is in conversation with a rich canon of Black queer men—the documentary poetics of Marlon T. Riggs, the editorial sensibility of Joseph Beam, the ceremonial politics of Essex Hemphill, and the cutting lucidity of James Baldwin. While Shikeith’s artistic universe addresses a number of masculine literary, musical, and cultural figures, his first universe, if we can call the vexed enmeshments of home a universe, was one of women. “I grew up in a household with my mother and my grandmother,” Shikeith told me recently on Zoom.…

Jean Depara’s photographs of nocturnal cosmopolitanism capture the effervescent sense of possibility that preceded and accompanied the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s shift from Belgian colony to early years of independence, in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. A hedonistic night owl roving around the nightclubs and bars of the capital, Depara lived his photography as a participant-observer. Depara’s practice began in 1951. His big break came in 1954, when he became the personal photographer for Franco, then the magnetic star of Congolese rumba. Depara opened his own studio, Jean Whisky Depara, two years later, establishing himself in portrait and street photography, often capturing vivacious scenes of Kinshasa’s nightlife. From 1975 to 1989, Depara lent his services to the government, retiring soon after and finally gaining international recognition in the 1990s, just…

Will Matsuda grew up in Oregon, a state famed for its environmental extremes—dense forest, volcanoes, desert, and Crater Lake, the deepest such body in the United States. Matsuda began to be interested in making images about place when he left home for college and experienced a longing for visual materials that reflect the complexity of the American landscape, with its ambivalent histories of theft, loss, and reinvention. As Susuki #2, an image from his series Hanafuda (2020–21), reveals, Matsuda works with a distinct vocabulary, seeming to construct his photographs piece by piece, using simple tools such as on-camera flash to create resonant, nearly aphoristic effects. Similar to vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Matsuda’s pictures manipulate elements of the natural world in order to comment on the ultimate…

Untitled (Bodybuilder I) is part of a portrait series made in 2003 and 2004 in which the Romanian photographer Alexandra Croitoru paired herself with a stereotypically masculine companion. In each example, the man is seated and looks away from the camera while Croitoru stands behind him, touching his shoulder and staring into the lens. In this image, she appears with a bodybuilder who trained at her local gym; in another, she is pictured with Adrian Năstase, who served as prime minister of Romania between 2000 and 2004. (Nastase was later tried and imprisoned for corruption.) Croitoru is based in Bucharest, where she studied and now teaches at the National Academy of Arts. In contrast to this kind of overtly staged, performative work, her recent series are more documentary in nature.…

Behind the gleaming Namsan Tower that stands imposingly at the center of Seoul rests Itaewon, a compact quarter in which locals, artists, U.S. soldiers, drag performers, Muslims, gay men, transgender people, sex workers, and expats from around the world have long coexisted. The district’s history is thorny: when the U.S. army established a base in the area in the years following the Korean War, it garnered a reputation as an untamed, foreign terrain where GIs and Americana ruled. Soon after, the neighborhood became a territory for outsiders of all kinds, offering refuge for those who did not belong anywhere else in the city. Seoul’s inadvertent dip into multiculturalism thus began under the mythical, Cold War–inspired pretext of U.S. armed forces safeguarding democracy in South Korea—a nation that remains largely ethnically…

Abstractions are generous in their faith: an offering for you, the viewer, to connect with an idea, with an emotion, with consciousness, through an alchemy of form, shape, color, line. With a minimum of descriptive detail from the visible world, abstractions can evoke concepts and dimensions often only accessed indirectly. The artist Fabiola Menchelli draws on this confluence of the material and the cosmic throughout her work. And, descriptive or not, as with any photograph, the conditions of production matter. Under the Blue Sun No. 2 (2015–17) suggests the movement of a solar flare, and a shifting oculus of indiscernible depth. Menchelli made the series in cyanotype at an observatory at Casa Wabi, a space designed by Tadao Ando along the Oaxacan coast in the artist’s native Mexico. From this…

Wendy Red Star: Delegation Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star, whose lens-based multimedia work recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. $65.00 The Lives of Images, Vol. 3: Archives, Histories, and Memory The Lives of Images series, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, gathers essays and interviews by essential voices in the field. Vol. 3 probes the necessity and limits of history, the politics of preservation and collective memory, and inquires as to what strategies centered in the archive might tell us about our present moment. $24.95 Zora J Murff: True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) In True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis), trailblazing artist Zora J Murff constructs an incisive, autobiographical retelling of the struggles and epiphanies of a…

“Reach out and touch faith,” Depeche Mode implored in “Personal Jesus.” In Myriam Boulos’s photographs, I could’ve sworn I heard her subjects whisper, “Reach out and touch me.” Faith is touch; touch is sacred. And the body is its own god. Against a purple sky, two naked men tenderly embrace; one is, indeed, whispering, not to us—the welcome voyeurs—but into the ear of his beloved. Juxtapose the delicacy of that moment—men stripped of the confines that patriarchy makes of masculinity—with the altogether more robust, and much more tightly cropped, image of two women kissing. Swallowing each other whole, more like. It is difficult to ascertain where one begins and the other ends. There is power in their desire. And that is what the revolution renders: powerful women and tender men.…

A boy watches as Jamie Hawkesworth passes the couchette the child’s family is riding in on the Trans-Siberian Railway as it runs from Moscow to Beijing. As his parents play chess, the boy hangs upside down from his upper berth, poised and perfectly still as he addresses Hawkesworth’s lens. The scene evokes the strange comfort that travel sometimes produces when, close to one’s nearest in small surroundings, the world unfurls on the other side of the window. Since making his name in fashion photography, Hawkesworth has used any available space in his work schedule to go on trips to places he hasn’t visited before. This desire arises from his wanderlust about the United Kingdom, the island nation he lives in, and the vastness of the lands that lie beyond. But…

For more than two decades, the German artist Tobias Zielony has been tracking people in marginalized communities, and the spaces they occupy, through the lenses of both still and motion-picture cameras. Treading a blurry line between documentary and fiction, his images primarily capture youths whose often-challenging milieus elicit a yearning for self-determination and varied forms of self-representation. Zielony infiltrates, even joins, his subjects’ worlds—subcultures he finds around the globe, following his own curiosity, intuition, and instinct—to reveal the lesser seen layers of society. Some of Zielony’s early photographic series depict protagonists caught in webs of poverty in places such as Canada and California; later series see him diving into nightlife subcultures in Eastern Europe and Asia. Beyond still photographs, Zielony has also produced videos, including Vele (2009–10), an eerie, abstract…