Aperture Gallery and Bookstore will be closed Monday, September 2, 2019

CONNECT COUNCIL MEMBER EVENT

Not an Aperture Connect Council Member? Join Connect Council today to receive an invitation for this event, as well as other special gatherings year round!

Aperture Connect Council Members are invited to a private collection tour and cocktail mixer at the home of Aperture trustee, Elaine Goldman.

This event will be held in conjunction with the Norton Museum of Art’s Young Friends Acquisition Council. Bites mindfully prepared by m&g foodstuff.

Elaine Goldman has been an Aperture trustee since 2013. Her collection features works by Joel Meyeorwitz, Martin Parr, Joel-Peter Witkin, George Tice, Erwin Olaf, Mitch Epstein, Shepard Fairey, and more.

Aperture Connect Council is an affiliate group of photography and photobook enthusiasts, ages twenty-one to forty.

The Norton Museum of Art’s Young Friends Acquisition Council is a unique opportunity reserved for Young Friends Patron members to further engage their interests in collecting and the current art market through conversations with curators and art professionals.

Join Aperture and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund for an artist talk with Mark Peterson.  Recipient of the 2018 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, Peterson will discuss his work on the series The Past is Never Dead, and his continuing coverage of the current political scene.

Peterson received the grant to continue his work on The Past is Never Dead, in which he photographs the modern-day Nationalism and white nationalism: looking at their traditions, symbols, and leaders; and, documenting the fight for who controls the narrative of free speech.

Peterson’s photographs “anticipated the Trump era,” writes James Estrin on the New York Times’ Lens blog. “His stark, critical images provide a jaundiced view of American political culture and have dominated the visual coverage of the rise of the right wing since 2013.”

Peterson grew up in Minnesota and has been working as an editorial photographer in New York for more than 30 years. He is is one of the most active and recognizable photojournalists working today, published in the New York Times, New York magazine, and TIME, among others. His latest book, Political Theatre, was published by Steidl in 2017. Peterson’s work is distinguished by its immediacy and rich, deeply saturated tones and detail.

The Smith Talks is a series of presentations, often featuring past recipients of the W. Eugene Smith Grant, and a longtime collaboration between the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and Aperture Foundation.

Since the Smith Memorial Fund’s inception in 1979, it has awarded over $1 million to photographers whose past work and proposed projects follow the tradition of W. Eugene Smith’s career as a photographic essayist. Recipients of the 2019 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund grants will be announced during a ceremony on Thursday, October 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd St., New York. Admission is free on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6 p.m. For more information, visit smithfund.org.

For more information about the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, contact Lou Desiderio at [email protected].

Celebrating the upcoming launch of the “Mexico City” issue of Aperture magazine, three artists discuss photography in Mexico today, from the conceptual to the political. This panel will include Iñaki Bonillas on his inventive reworking of his grandfather’s archive, Pablo López Luz on his black-and-white streetscapes documenting the volcanic-stone surfaces of Mexican architecture, and Mayra Martell on her photographic homages to the families of women disappeared due to the drug wars in Ciudad Juárez. Each artist’s work is featured in the “Mexico City” issue, which illuminates the diverse image culture in North America’s largest metropolis and the ways Mexican photographers are pushing new visions in the medium.

This event is moderated by the New York-based Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue.

Iñaki Bonillas (b. 1981, lives and works in Mexico City) is a conceptual artist whose work traces family and social histories through photography, video, installation, site-specific installations, and artist books. In his deeply researched exhibition projects, from interventions inside Casa Luis Barragán to collaborations with bookbinders, he pushes beyond the two-dimensional to plumb private and collective memory. His work integrates photography in a creative process wherein reality, fiction, and the fluctuating worlds of word and image all coexist. Bonillas’s work has been exhibited at major institutions and art fairs in Mexico, the United States, and Europe.

Pablo López Luz (b. 1979, lives and works in Mexico City) has worked throughout Latin America, often focusing on the land and the built environment in cities. In 2018, he was commissioned by Museo Experimental El Eco to make a series of photographs that consider the volcanic-stone surfaces of buildings throughout Mexico City, from pre-Hispanic and colonial temples to modernist homes. His work has been exhibited internationally, collected in several monographs, and featured in numerous magazines, including Foam and Aperture.

Mayra Martell (b. 1979, lives and works in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez) has worked extensively, first in Juárez, her hometown, and then across Latin America, on the stories of families whose daughters have been killed or disappeared. She has also documented the mothers of people murdered by the Colombian Army and the everyday nature of drug culture in Sinaloa. Her book Ciudad Juárez was the winner of 2^nd prize at the 2011 Fotobookfestival Kasel in Germany.

Álvaro Enrigue (b. 1969, lives and works in New York) is a Mexican writer based in New York and a professor at Hofstra University. His work has appeared in the New York Times, n+1, London Review of Books, and El País. His novel Sudden Death was published in English in 2017.

Aperture thanks Centro de la Imagine and Selina High Line for supporting the launch of this issue in New York.

Significant support for Aperture magazine is provided by The Kanakia Foundation. Further generous support is provided in partby The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Image caption: Iñaki Bonillas, Adiós fotografia (Bye bye photography), Mexico City (detail), 2018

Friday, September 20: 11:00am – 7:00pm
Saturday, September 21: 11:00am – 7:00pm
Sunday, September 22: 11:00am – 6:00pm

Visit Aperture Foundation at the Eighth International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art. EXPO CHICAGO presents artwork from leading galleries from around the world, dynamic on-site programming, panel discussions, and a curated selection of new media, film and video works.

For more information and to buy tickets, see here.

Visit Aperture Foundation at the NY Art Book Fair at Booth O-01, for a three-day event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. Exhibitors range from photography and art book publishers, small and large, to individual artists and institutions.

Saturday, September 21, 2:00 p.m.:
Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb signing their upcoming book Brooklyn: The City Within

Further programming details coming soon. 

Preview – Thursday, September 19: 6:00–9:00 p.m. (Ticketed) 
Friday, September 20: 1:00–7:00 p.m.
Saturday, September 21: 11:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
Sunday, September 22: 11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.

For more information, see visit printedmatterartbookfairs.org.

The talk will be followed by a book signing. Books will be available for sale at the Festival. See here for more information about Filter Photo Festival. 

Join Sasha Wolf and special guests Kelli Connell and Richard Renaldi, as they discuss Wolf’s new book PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, published by Aperture (September 2019). Edited and introduced by Wolf, PhotoWork is a collection of interviews by forty photographers about their approach to making photographs and, more importantly, a sustained body of work.

After a decade of running Sasha Wolf Gallery, Sasha Wolf now represents emerging and midcareer fine-art photographers in a private practice,.Prior to her work in the photography world, Wolf was a writer, director, and producer in the film and television industries. An award-winning filmmaker, her film Joe (1997) was nominated for the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

Aperture Foundation is pleased to present an artist talk with photographer couple Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, who, between the two of them, have published some nineteen books. They will present their forthcoming Aperture book, Brooklyn: The City Within, which features photographs of their home borough for the past twenty years.

Alex has wandered throughout Brooklyn, exploring its tremendous diversity. This parallels other work he has made in the past forty years, traveling to photograph different cultures around the world—many of which are represented in the place he now calls home. Contrasting with this approach, Rebecca photographed “the green city within the city within the city.” The green spaces lie in the heart of the city—the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Green-Wood Cemetery, and Prospect Park, where Brooklynites gather from all walks of life cross paths as they find solace in nature. Together, the Webbs’ photographs of Brooklyn tell a larger American story, one that touches on immigration, community, nature, and home.

Alex and Rebecca will present a variety of both collaborative and individual projects, including Alex’s La Calle (Aperture, 2016), a book of some thirty years of his photographs from Mexico, and Rebecca’s My Dakota (2012), an elegy for her brother, who died unexpectedly. The event will conclude with a Q&A and book signing.

Alex Webb (born in San Francisco, 1952) has published more than fifteen books, including The Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011) and Slant Rhymes (2017, with Rebecca Norris Webb). A Magnum Photos member since 1979, Webb received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His work has been shown widely, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Rebecca Norris Webb (born in Rushville, Indiana, 1956), originally a poet, often explores the complicated relationship between people and the natural world in her seven books, including Brooklyn: The City Within (Aperture, 2019, with Alex Webb), and My Dakota (2012). A 2019 NEA grant recipient, she’s exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Do you know where you’re going next with your photography–or where it’s taking you? This intensive weekend workshop will help photographers begin to understand their own distinct way of seeing the world. It also will help photographers figure out their next step photographically–from deepening their own unique vision, to the process of discovering and making a long-term project that they’re passionate about. A workshop for serious amateurs and professionals alike, it will be taught by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, a creative team who often edit projects and books together-including their new Aperture book, Brooklyn: The City Within.

CONNECT COUNCIL MEMBER EVENT

Not an Aperture Connect Council Member? Join Connect Council today to receive an invitation to tour Dia: Beacon, as well as other special gatherings year round!

Aperture Connect Council Members are invited to a day trip to Dia:Beacon. The schedule will include an early viewing of Michael Heizer’s North, East, South, West and a guided-museum tour of the Dia:Beacon collection with work by Donald Judd, Louise Lawler, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin.

After the tour, members will have the option to spend additional time at the museum and outdoor grounds, have lunch in Dia:Beacon’s cafe, or explore the area.

In May 2003, Dia Art Foundation opened Dia:Beacon on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York, in a former Nabisco box-printing factory. The museum showcases Dia’s collection of art from the 1960s to the present, as well as special exhibitions and public programs.

Image: Dan Flavin, gold, pink and red, red, 1964. © Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore will be closed Monday, October 14, 2019.

This event is free for students with ID and Aperture Members at the $50 level and above.

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the photography program at The New School’s Parsons School of Design, is pleased to present a conversation between photographers Paul Graham and Elinor Carucci, moderated by curator and lecturer Sasha Wolf.

Join us for a night discussing Wolf’s forthcoming book, PhotoWork, a collection of interviews by forty photographers—including Graham and Carucci—about their approach to making photographs and, more importantly, a sustained body of work. Wolf was inspired to seek out and assemble responses to specific questions after hearing from countless young photographers that they often feel adrift in their own practice, wondering if they are doing it the “right” way. The responses, from both established and emerging photographers, reveal that there is no single path. The evening will delve into Graham and Carucci’s answers from the book and the ways in which they each approach their photographic practice.

After a decade of running Sasha Wolf Gallery, Sasha Wolf now represents emerging and midcareer fine-art photographers in a private practice,.Prior to her work in the photography world, Wolf was a writer, director, and producer in the film and television industries. An award-winning filmmaker, her film Joe (1997) was nominated for the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

British photographer Paul Graham lives and works in New York. Over the past three decades, he has produced thirteen distinct bodies of work and published dedicated monographs for nearly every series, including the twelve-volume a shimmer of possibility (2007), which received the 2011 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award for the best photobook published in the previous fifteen years. Graham is the recipient of numerous honors and grants, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the Hasselblad Award. He has a degree and an honorary doctorate, but is self-taught in photography.

Elinor Carucci graduated from Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography in 1995 and moved to New York the same year. Since then, she has been awarded an International Center of Photography Infinity Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Carucci has published four monographs to date: Closer (2002), Diary of a Dancer (2005), Mother (2013), and Midlife (2019). She teaches in the graduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts.

Join photographer Drew Nikonowicz for a two-day workshop intended for photographers interested in learning about large format photography, while building their own 4×5 – courtesy of Standard Cameras. This DIY approach will lead to a deeper understanding of image-making both inside and outside the camera. Regardless of your background, this workshop will leave you with all the knowledge and tools you need to successfully shoot with a large format camera. Drew founded Standard Cameras in 2018 as a platform to empower photographers everywhere to improve their skills through affordable equipment and valuable educational content.

Participants will begin by assembling their own Standard 4×5 as a group, while familiarizing themselves with their new 4×5. After assembly is complete, they will have an opportunity to practice making photographs with both a standard film back and Polaroid film back. Large format is a slow process, which forces the user to focus on each image in a radically different way. With Drew’s guidance, participants will receive advice on how to approach image-making with large format through hands-on practice, and later discussions on compositional and conceptual considerations while shooting. Participants will take home a hand-made Standard 4×5, several Polaroid photographs, and information on large format equipment.

Drew Nikonowicz (born in St. Louis, Missouri, 1993) earned a BFA degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2016. His work employs analog photographic processes as well as computer simulations to deal with exploration and experience in contemporary culture. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 2015 he received the Aperture Portfolio Prize and the Lenscratch Student Prize. In 2017 Nikonowicz completed a one-year residency at Fabrica Research Centre. He now lives and works in the United States in Saint Louis, Missouri as an artist and owner of the company Standard Cameras. His first photobook, This World and Others Like It, was co-published by Yoffy Press and Fw:Books in 2019.

Visit Aperture during the 23rd edition of Paris Photo, an international art fair dedicated to the photographic medium, a key rendez-vous for dealers, collectors, curators, artists and art aficionados. See here for more information and to purchase tickets.

Further programming details coming soon. 

Friday, November 8

1:00 p.m. — Announcement of the Winners for the 2019 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards

Not an Aperture Member? Join Aperture’s membership program to get closer to the best in photography.

Aperture Members are invited to an exhibition preview on Thursday, November 21, from 6:00–7:00 p.m., for the 2019 Portfolio Prize Winner Mark McKnight’s exhibition, and the 2019 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist. Mark McKnight’s black-and-white images of bodies and landscapes challenge Eurocentric ideas about male beauty—and aim to make “straight” photography a little less straight. The PhotoBook Awards Shortlist comprises thirty-five volumes, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography.

6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Member preview reception

6:30 p.m. Remarks

7:00 – 8:30 p.m. Public opening

Mark McKnight (born in Los Angeles, 1984) was born to a New Mexican mother who struggled with their Southwestern, diasporic roots. In turn, McKnight grappled with reconciling his own identity, both as a mixed-race person of color and as a gay man—particularly one who neither exemplified nor desired the idealized, Eurocentric cultural standard of male beauty that is perpetuated even within gay culture. Since McKnight was raised in an environment that privileges white, heterosexual masculinity, his work operates as a site of resistance to those values. McKnight completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Finland in 2009, and he has also completed artist residencies at Storm King Art Center (2017) and Light Work (2019). In 2018 McKnight gave the first in a series of public lectures titled “Queer Eye,” in which he confronted the shortsighted legacy of “straight,” modernist photographic practice while proposing a queered historical revision; that same year he held two solo exhibitions that received favorable national reviews. His work was the subject of both a two-person gallery exhibition at Roger’s Office in Los Angeles and a multi-museum survey and catalogue. His most recent group exhibition, Close to Home (Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, 2019), dealt with the themes of identity and abstract narrative. His work is currently represented by James Harris, Seattle.

About the Aperture Portfolio Prize

The purpose of the Aperture Portfolio Prize is to identify high-quality work by new voices in contemporary photography. When choosing the first-prize winner and runners-up, Aperture’s editorial and curatorial staff look for innovative bodies of work that haven’t been widely seen in major publications or exhibition venues.

The Portfolio Prize is open to Aperture magazine print subscribers and to Aperture Members at the $250 Friend level or above. For more information about the prize, visit aperture.org/portfolio-prize.

About The PhotoBook Awards

The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrates the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. Initiated in November 2012 by Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.

Image: Mark McKnight, Bodyfold, 2018; from the series Decreation

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, corporate foundations and private foundations including the Grace Jones Richardson Trust.

Join Aperture for the opening receptions of both the 2019 Portfolio Prize Winner Mark McKnights’s exhibition and the 2019 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist. Mark McKnight’s black-and-white images of bodies and landscapes challenge Eurocentric ideas about male beauty—and aim to make “straight” photography a little less straight. The PhotoBook Awards Shortlist comprises thirty-five volumes, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography.

Mark McKnight (born in Los Angeles, 1984) was born to a New Mexican mother who struggled with their Southwestern, diasporic roots. In turn, McKnight grappled with reconciling his own identity, both as a mixed-race person of color and as a gay man—particularly one who neither exemplified nor desired the idealized, Eurocentric cultural standard of male beauty that is perpetuated even within gay culture. Since McKnight was raised in an environment that privileges white, heterosexual masculinity, his work operates as a site of resistance to those values. McKnight completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Finland in 2009, and he has also completed artist residencies at Storm King Art Center (2017) and Light Work (2019). In 2018 McKnight gave the first in a series of public lectures titled “Queer Eye,” in which he confronted the shortsighted legacy of “straight,” modernist photographic practice while proposing a queered historical revision; that same year he held two solo exhibitions that received favorable national reviews. His work was the subject of both a two-person gallery exhibition at Roger’s Office in Los Angeles and a multi-museum survey and catalogue. His most recent group exhibition, Close to Home (Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, 2019), dealt with the themes of identity and abstract narrative. His work is currently represented by James Harris, Seattle.

About the Aperture Portfolio Prize

The purpose of the Aperture Portfolio Prize is to identify high-quality work by new voices in contemporary photography. When choosing the first-prize winner and runners-up, Aperture’s editorial and curatorial staff look for innovative bodies of work that haven’t been widely seen in major publications or exhibition venues.

The Portfolio Prize is open to Aperture magazine print subscribers and to Aperture Members at the $250 Friend level or above. For more information about the prize, visit aperture.org/portfolio-prize.

About The PhotoBook Awards

The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrates the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. Initiated in November 2012 by Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.

Image: Mark McKnight, Bodyfold, 2018; from the series Decreation

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, corporate foundations and private foundations including the Grace Jones Richardson Trust.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore will be closing at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 27, 2019.

Aperture Foundation Gallery and Bookstore will be closing at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 24, 2019.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore will be closed for the Holidays starting December 25, 2019. We will reopen Thursday, January 2, 2020.