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-08, 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.

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.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore will be closed Saturday, September 28, 2019

Internationally acclaimed artists, collectors, and gallerists have generously donated works for a special photography auction, to be presented by Christie’s New York on October 2, 2019. All proceeds support Aperture’s 20/20: A Bold Vision capital campaign, directly funding Aperture’s purchase of a new space in Manhattan—a flexible meeting, education, and event space and HQ for its global publishing operations. 

Aperture Lots 201–254 

Viewings 

September 28 (10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.)
September 29 (1:00–5:00 p.m.)
September 30 (10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.)
October 1 (10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.) 

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, October 3, from 6:00–7:00 p.m., of Audubon Mural Project: Photographs by Gail Albert Halaban.

A collaboration between the National Audubon Society and Gitler &_____, the Audubon Mural Project has commissioned a spectrum of artists—from fine-art painters to graffiti artists—to create murals of imperiled birds, with each mural loosely based on the watercolors of John James Audubon, the pioneering nineteenth-century ornithologist. The murals are sited in and around the Washington Heights neighborhood, where John James Audubon lived and worked.

In 2019, at the initiative of Jill Fairchild, the artist Gail Albert Halaban was commissioned to document a selection of these murals before—given the transient nature of street art—they begin to fade or disappear. Albert Halaban’s resulting photographs place the murals within the context of the community. The photographs, like the murals themselves, serve to remind us that birds and people coexist, and that we both need a healthy environment in order to survive.

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

6:30 p.m. Remarks

7:00 – 8:00 p.m. Public opening

Works featured in this exhibition are available for sale, with proceeds benefiting the National Audubon Society and supporting Aperture’s publishing and public programs.

For more information about the Audubon Mural Project or to sponsor a future bird mural, visit audubon.org/amp.

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Jill Fairchild.

Join Aperture for the opening reception of Audubon Mural Project: Photographs by Gail Albert Halaban.

A collaboration between the National Audubon Society and Gitler &_____, the Audubon Mural Project has commissioned a spectrum of artists—from fine-art painters to graffiti artists—to create murals of imperiled birds, with each mural loosely based on the watercolors of John James Audubon, the pioneering nineteenth-century ornithologist. The murals are sited in and around the Washington Heights neighborhood, where John James Audubon lived and worked.

In 2019, at the initiative of Jill Fairchild, the artist Gail Albert Halaban was commissioned to document a selection of these murals before—given the transient nature of street art—they begin to fade or disappear. Albert Halaban’s resulting photographs place the murals within the context of the community. The photographs, like the murals themselves, serve to remind us that birds and people coexist, and that we both need a healthy environment in order to survive.

Works featured in this exhibition are available for sale, with proceeds benefiting the National Audubon Society and supporting Aperture’s publishing and public programs.

For more information about the Audubon Mural Project or to sponsor a future bird mural, visit audubon.org/amp.

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Jill Fairchild.

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. Join a guided-museum tour of the Dia:Beacon collection with work by Donald Judd, Louise Lawler, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin.

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.

Invitation Only

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 Elinor Carucci, Paul Graham, and Gus Powell, 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 Carucci, Graham, and Powell—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 Carucci, Graham, and Powell’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.

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.

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.

Gus Powell attended Oberlin College, where he studied comparative religion. His books include The Company of Strangers (2003), The Lonely Ones (2015), and FAMILY CAR TROUBLE (2019). He is a member of the street photographers’ collective In-Public and is on the faculty of the MFA photography, video, and related media department at the School of Visual Arts.

Click here to learn more about Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice 

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, and from corporate foundations and private foundations including: Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Image: Paul Graham, Woman Smoking Cigarette, Belfast, 1988, from New Europe; © Paul Graham

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.

Monday, October 21
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
RSVP REQUIRED (details to follow)

Join Aperture and Airbnb Magazine for a cocktail and conversation featuring The New Black Vanguard author Antwaun Sargent and artist contributors Tyler Mitchell and Jamal Nxedlana at NeueHouse on Monday, October 21. Sargent and contributors will talk about their work, the international scope of black artists working today, and sign copies of the newly released book.

In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curator and critic Antwaun addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The work included opens up the conversations around the role of the Black body and Black lives as subject; collectively, these fifteen artists celebrate Black creativity and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image. Their work may be seen as a form of visual activism seeking to challenge the idea that blackness is homoegenous. It’s a perspective often seen from this loose movement of emerging talents who are creating photography in vastly different contexts —New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London. The results — often made  in collaboration with black stylists and fashion designers — present new perspectives on the medium of photography and notions of race and beauty, gender and power.

The New Black Vanguard is presented in partnership with Airbnb Magazine.

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, October 24, from 6:00–7:00 p.m., for the opening of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion.

6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Member preview reception
7:00 – 8:30 p.m. Public opening

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
Curated by Antwaun Sargent

Photographs by Campbell Addy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Awol Erizku, Nadine Ijewere, Quil Lemons, Namsa Leuba, Renell Medrano, Tyler Mitchell, Jamal Nxedlana, Daniel Obasi, Ruth Ossai, Adrienne Raquel, Dana Scruggs, and Stephen Tayo.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion presents fifteen artists, whose vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been widely consumed in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, and museums, as well as on their individual social-media channels, reinfusing the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance. The images open up conversations around the roles of the black body and black lives as subject matter; collectively, they celebrate black creativity and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image. Seeking to challenge the idea that blackness is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism. It’s a perspective often seen from this loose movement of emerging talents, who are creating photography in vastly different contexts—New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London. The results—often made in collaboration with black stylists and fashion designers—present new perspectives on the medium of photography and the notions of race and beauty, gender and power.

This exhibition includes selected works from groundbreaking contemporary photographers. The framed work sits alongside vitrines of publications, past and present, that contextualize these images and chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.

Antwaun Sargent is an independent writer, curator, and critic, whose work has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, W, Vogue, VICE, and various museum catalogues, among other publications.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Airbnb Magazine.

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, and from corporate foundations and private foundations including: Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Join Aperture on Thursday, October 24, from 7:00–8:30 p.m., for the opening of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
Curated by Antwaun Sargent

Photographs by Campbell Addy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Awol Erizku, Nadine Ijewere, Quil Lemons, Namsa Leuba, Renell Medrano, Tyler Mitchell, Jamal Nxedlana, Daniel Obasi, Ruth Ossai, Adrienne Raquel, Dana Scruggs, and Stephen Tayo.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion presents fifteen artists, whose vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been widely consumed in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, and museums, as well as on their individual social-media channels, reinfusing the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance. The images open up conversations around the roles of the black body and black lives as subject matter; collectively, they celebrate black creativity and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image. Seeking to challenge the idea that blackness is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism. It’s a perspective often seen from this loose movement of emerging talents, who are creating photography in vastly different contexts—New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London. The results—often made in collaboration with black stylists and fashion designers—present new perspectives on the medium of photography and the notions of race and beauty, gender and power.

This exhibition includes selected works from groundbreaking contemporary photographers. The framed work sits alongside vitrines of publications, past and present, that contextualize these images and chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.

Antwaun Sargent is an independent writer, curator, and critic, whose work has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, W, Vogue, VICE, and various museum catalogues, among other publications.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Airbnb Magazine.

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, and from corporate foundations and private foundations including: Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

In celebration of the forthcoming title Provincetown, Aperture is pleased to present an artist talk and book signing with Joel Meyerowitz.

Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, Meyerowitz spent his summers in Provincetown Massachusetts—a safe haven for the queer community and getaway for artists—roaming the seaside with an 8-by-10 camera, making exquisite, sharply observed portraits of families, couples, children, artists, and other denizens of the progressive community. In this work, a cast of characters appears and reappears from season to season against a backdrop of sea, sand, and sun. Provincetown collects one hundred portraits, most never-before published, bringing viewers into an idyllic world of self-styled individualism.

Joel Meyerowitz (born in New York, 1938) is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He is a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of both National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities awards, and a recipient of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. Meyerowitz has published thirty books. He lives in Italy.

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, and from corporate foundations and private foundations including: Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Image: Joel Meyerowitz, Renee, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1981; from Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown (Aperture, 2019); © Joel Meyerowitz

Aperture Members at the Patron Circle ($1,000) level or above 

Join Aperture Foundation in Paris November 7-10, 2019, for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the 2019 edition of Paris Photo,the leading international art fair dedicated to the photographic medium.

As an Aperture Trustee or Patron Member traveling to Paris, you will be provided the highest Collector’s Circle access to Paris Photo, the world’s leading fair on photography, as well as invitations to activities curated by Aperture editors, including studio visits with artists Samuel Gratacap and Mohamed Bourouissa; a private exhibition tour with artist Malala Andrialavidrazana, featured in the “Platform Africa” issue of Aperture magazine; an exclusive preview of the French fashion designer agnès b.’s forthcoming gallery and concept space; champagne viewing of photographic work at David Zwirner Paris; and invitations to a celebratory cocktail and four-course dinner by chef Bertrand Grébaut at Septime, and a welcome cocktail gathering hosted by Aperture Board Chair Cathy Kaplan at Le Meurice.

Space is very limited. Reserve your spot today!

An Aperture membership (valid through November 10, 2019) at the Patron Circle($1,000), Benefactor Circle($2,500), or Paul Strand Circle($5,000) level is required to participate in any of the Aperture-organized activities in Paris.

*A participation fee ($385 for one Patron Member; or $725 for two Patron Members) is required. Aperture has also reserved a block of rooms (November 4–10) at a special rate at Hotel Le Meurice (228 rue de Rivoli).

Contact Kodie-Ann at [email protected] or 212.946.7108 for more details on the trip and Aperture’s Patron Program.

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

Join TASCHEN and the Consulate General of Brazil at Aperture for the launch of Miguel Rio Branco’s latest book, Maldicidade (TASCHEN, 2019). The evening will consist of an artist talk with Rio Branco followed by a book signing.

In Maldicidade, the city never sleeps. By dawn or dusk, in New York, Havana, Tokyo, or Salvador, Brazil, it is an environment fraught with yearning, aching with solitude, and fretful with fortunes never made. This searing urban portrait from Rio Branco draws upon his itinerant early years, as the son of diplomats, to reveal the common threads of struggle and loneliness in metropolises around the world. Rio Branco focuses his camera on the city’s refuse and margins—on that which it has thrown away and on those it has cast aside and disappointed. In stark frames or soft impressions, it is street sleepers, beggars, prostitutes, stray dogs, smashed cars, and shattered glass that characterize his urban impressions.

Born in Las Palmas, Spain, Miguel Rio Branco is a Brazilian and French photographer, painter, filmmaker, and multimedia artist based in Araras, Rio de Janeiro. His work is featured in leading museum collections around the world—including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Centre Pompidou—and has been exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Bienal de São Paulo; and Aperture Foundation, New York, among other institutions. Rio Branco’s awards and prizes include the Prix du Livre Photo at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, Prix Kodak de la Critique Photographique, and International Critics’ Award at the 1982 Lille Documentary Festival.

Celebrating the forthcoming Aperture title The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, this conversation will address the radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The featuring of the black figure and black runway and cover models in the media and art has been a marker of increasingly inclusive fashion and art communities. In the book, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent opens up the conversation around the role of the black body in the marketplace; the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image; and the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to black photographers participating more fully in the fashion (and art) industries.

The panel will include Antwaun Sargent and photographers and New School alumni Quil Lemons and Renell Medrano. The event will be moderated by educator Kimberly Jenkins.

This conversation is presented by Aperture Foundation and the Photography Program of Parsons School of Art and Design at The New School.

Kimberly Jenkins is an educator who specializes in the sociocultural and historical influences behind why we wear what we wear, specifically addressing how politics, psychology, race, and gender shape the way we “fashion” our identity. Based in New York, with a background in cultural anthropology and art history, she is a lecturer at Parsons School of Art and Design. In Fall 2016, Kim debuted the undergraduate course Fashion and Race, examining the implications of the social construct of race in fashion history, business, and image-making. In Spring 2019, Kim worked as an education consultant for Gucci to support their efforts on cultural awareness and sensitivity.

Antwaun Sargent is an independent writer, curator, and critic whose work has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, W, Vogue, VICE, and various museum catalogues, among other publications.

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees, our members and other individuals, and from corporate foundations and private foundations including: Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Image: Quil Lemons, New York, 2017, from The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019); © Quil Lemons

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.