Aperture’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide
From the best-selling Aperture photobooks The New Black Vanguard and PhotoWork; to new monographs by Ming Smith, Josef Koudelka, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya; to essay and activity books to inspire readers, we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.
Must-Haves for Photography Lovers
The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in art and fashion today, highlighting the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.
Josef Koudelka: Ruins
For more than twenty years, Josef Koudelka has traveled throughout the Mediterranean, photographing over two hundred archaeological sites. With its stark and mesmerizing panoramic images, Ruins is a monument to architectural and cultural history, as well as to civilizations long past.
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. Over thirty years after it was first published, the influence of The Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms can still be felt, firmly establishing it as a contemporary classic.
Aperture Magazine Subscription
Leading the conversation on contemporary photography with thought-provoking commentary and visually immersive portfolios, Aperture is required reading for everyone seriously interested in photography. With thematic issues ranging from “Vision & Justice” to “Future Gender,” “Native America,” and more, Aperture has been the essential guide to photography since 1952. This year, gift a subscription and give four issues of Aperture and a copy of The PhotoBook Review.
Give the Gift of Inspiration
PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice
How does a photographic project or series evolve? How important are “style” and “genre”? What comes first—the photographs or a concept? PhotoWork is a collection of interviews by forty photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained a body of work. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, editor Sasha Wolf’s interviews provide essential insights and advice from both emerging and established photographers—including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Todd Hido, Alec Soth, Rinko Kawauchi, and more—while also revealing that there is no single path in photography.
Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present
What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between esteemed photographers and artists, critics, curators, and editors since 1985.
Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities
In the latest from our Photography Workshop Series, Dawoud Bey offers insights into portrait photography. Through images and words, he shares his own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues—from how he approaches strangers and establishes relationships, to how he sensitively represents communities.
The Photographer’s Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas
The best way to learn is by doing. The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals. Whether you’re looking for exercises to improve your craft, or just interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with photographic processes.
Photobooks Celebrating Black Artists
Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful
Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the ’50s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been under-recognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has portrayed the personal and the powerful in her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, Caribbean, and Africa. One of the most compelling photographers working today, Lawson’s An Aperture Monograph is the long-awaited first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a Deana Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in the book’s essay. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is the first widely released publication of one of the most celebrated up-and-coming photographers working today. Sepuya’s photographs challenge and deconstruct traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, all through the perspective of a Black, queer gaze.
Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph
One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith’s work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes, alongside a range of illuminating essays and interviews.
For the True New Yorker
Danny Lyon: The Destruction of Lower Manhattan
First published in 1969, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan is a lasting document of nearly sixty acres of downtown New York architecture before its destruction in a wave of urban development. In 1966, Danny Lyon settled into a downtown loft, becoming one of the few artists to document the dramatic changes taking place. More than fifty years later, his striking photographs still appeal to our emotions, capturing this singular period of time.
Perfect Strangers: New York City Street Photographs by Melissa O’Shaughnessy
Over the last seven years, Melissa O’Shaughnessy has photographed daily on the streets of New York, capturing the fleeting moments when light, people, and the chaos of the city collide in surprising, poignant, and humorous ways. Brought together in her first book, featuring an introduction by Joel Meyerowitz, Perfect Strangers offers a refreshing addition to the tradition of street photography.
Brooklyn: The City Within by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb have been photographing this New York City borough for the past five years, creating a profound and vibrant portrait. The two artists took individual approaches to capturing the borough: Alex photographed across the various neighborhoods; and Rebecca focused on three major green spaces in the heart of Brooklyn—the “green city within the city”—in both images and words. Together, their photographs of Brooklyn tell a larger American story, one that touches on immigration, identity, and home.
Ethan James Green: Young New York
Ethan James Green’s first monograph presents a selection of striking portraits of New York’s Millennial scene-makers, a gloriously diverse cast of models, artists, nightlife icons, queer youth, and gender binary–flouting muses of the fashion world and beyond. Young New York showcases a bright young talent who is redefining beauty and identity for a new generation.
Photobooks for the Armchair Traveler
Gail Albert Halaban: Italian Views
Through Gail Albert Halaban’s lens, the viewer is welcomed into the private lives of ordinary Italians. Her photographs explore the conventions and tensions of urban lifestyles, feelings of isolation in the city, and the intimacies of home and daily life. Francine Prose’s wonderful essay discusses the curious thrill of being a viewer. This invitation to imagine the lives of neighbors across windows renders the characters and settings personal and mysterious.
Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, Joel Meyerowitz spent his summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a safe haven for the queer community and a getaway for artists. Provincetown collects one hundred exquisite, sharply observed portraits—most never before published—of families, couples, children, artists, and other denizens of the progressive community.
In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs of the tender cadences of everyday living have begun to swing further afield from her earlier work. In Halo, Kawauchi expands her inquiry, photographing three main themes—Lunar New Year celebrations in Hebei province in China (where a five-hundred-year-old tradition calls for molten iron hurled in lieu of fireworks), the southern coastal region of Izumo in Japan, and an ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. The resulting images knit together a mesmerizing exploration of the spirituality of the natural world.
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works by Stephen Shore
Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years.
Children’s Activity and Educational Books
This Equals That by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin
This clever and surprising picture book by artists Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin takes young viewers on a whimsical journey while teaching them associative thinking and visual language, as well as colors, shapes, and numbers. Through a simple narrative and a rhythmic sequence of photographs, the book generates multiple meanings, making the experience of reading it interactive—with everyday scenes transformed into a game of pairs, enjoyable for adults and children alike.
Seeing Things by Joel Meyerowitz
Seeing Things is a wonderful introduction to photography that asks how photographers transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Joel Meyerowitz introduces young readers to the power and magic of photography, exploring key concepts in photography—from light, gesture, and composition, through the work of master photographers such as William Eggleston, Mary Ellen Mark, Helen Levitt, Martin Parr, and more.
Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids
Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations and build their own visual language. Indoors or outdoors, from a half-hour to a whole day, there is a photo activity for all occasions—and some don’t even require a camera!
For the Collector
This highly collectible, limited-edition pop-up book is a work of art in itself, rendering Daniel Gordon’s sculptural forms into a new layer of materiality and animating them in a pop-up performance. The book consists of six works in pop-up form, some featuring simple plants, others unfolding more elaborate tableaux.
Vik Muniz: Postcards from Nowhere
Vik Muniz’s two-volume Postcards from Nowhere grapples with how, through photographs, we have come to “see” and understand distant yet iconic sites we may never actually view with our own eyes, while also serving as an homage to the quasi-obsolete artifact of the picture postcard. Volume I includes thirty-two single postcards displaying each of the images in the series; while Volume II presents a series of thirty-six postcards that, when assembled, can be viewed as a single, large-scale work of thirty-by-forty inches.
Gregory Halpern: Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Limited Edition)
In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, Gregory Halpern presents a thoughtful and visually striking depiction of the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history. Featuring texts by Clément Chéroux and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, the book offers a poetic examination of Guadeloupe’s natural beauty and troubling history side by side. This limited-edition box set features a signed print and special version of the book, with artist proceeds donated to Locust Street Art (Buffalo, New York) and the Pan American Health Organization.
Gregory Crewdson: An Eclipse of Moths
This limited-edition, slipcased volume expands on Gregory Crewdson’s obsessive exploration of the small-town, postindustrial American landscape. Featuring sixteen never-before-published photographs, An Eclipse of Moths is luxuriously produced at a scale that offers an immersive experience of each of Crewdson’s carefully crafted scenes.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale and save up to 35% off books, magazines, and prints, as well as newly released signed books by Antwaun Sargent, Justine Kurland, Ming Smith, and more.
