Aperture’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide
Legendary photographers. Iconic monographs. Thought-provoking essay books. Here are 28 essential Aperture titles that are sure to inspire everyone on your list.
From best-selling Aperture books The New Black Vanguard and Photo No-Nos; to iconic monographs by Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, and Philip Montgomery; to essay and activity books for all-ages—we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.
Must-Haves for Photography Lovers
As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic
As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection, the book features works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa—providing a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.
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.
American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams
For fifty years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. American Silence features over 175 works from Adams’s career photographing throughout Colorado, California, and Oregon—capturing suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and the land—examining the artist’s act of looking at the world around him and the almost palpable silence of his photographs.
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 “Native America,” “New York,” and more, Aperture has been the essential guide to photography since 1952.
Give the Gift of Inspiration
Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph
What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.
The Lives of Images, Volumes 1 & 2
The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The first volume, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation, addresses the multiple life cycles of the image and the significance of technological reproduction for contemporary forms of social, cultural, and political life. Meanwhile, Vol. 2: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention addresses the complex relationships that the reproducible image creates with its viewers, and their bodies, minds, and identities.
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, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth, and more—while also revealing that there is no single path in photography.
The Photography Workshop Series Bundle
In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. From Richard Misrach on landscape photography and meaning, to Dawoud Bey on photographing people and community, to Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on the poetic image, these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.
Contemporary Classics
Philip Montgomery: American Mirror
Through his intimate, powerful reporting and signature black-and-white style, Philip Montgomery reveals the fault lines of American society—from police violence and the opioid addiction crisis, to the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrations in support of Black lives. American Mirror is the first monograph by the award-winning photographer, distilling his vision through seventy-one iconic images. Like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans before him, Montgomery has made an unforgettable testament of a nation at a crossroads.
Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance (Tenth Anniversary Edition)
Ten years after its original publication, Aperture republishes Rinko Kawauchi’s beloved volume Illuminance. Through her images of keenly observed gestures and details, Kawauchi reveals the mysterious and beautiful realm at the edge of the everyday world. As Kawauchi describes, “I want imagination in the photographs—a photograph is like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.” This new edition of Illuminance retains the Japanese photographer’s original sequence, alongside texts by David Chandler, Lesley A. Martin, and Masatake Shinohara.
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 Aperture Monograph is the long-awaited first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a 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.”
For over twenty years, Gillian Laub has photographed her family in an exploration of the ways society’s most complex questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships. For Laub, this became all the more tangible when she found herself on the opposing side from her family during the 2016 US presidential election—and further in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and protests in support of Black Lives Matter. Family Matters combines Laub’s subversively funny and often gut-wrenchingly familiar photographs alongside personal reflections, offering a compelling picture of the fractures in contemporary American society through the artist’s own family.
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 Celebrating Black Artists
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.
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 underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.
Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal
Throughout his prolific and interdisciplinary career, Hank Willis Thomas’s work has explored issues of representation, perception, and American history. At the core of his practice is the ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprise American culture, with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity. All Things Being Equal is the first in-depth overview of Thomas’s extensive career, highlighting the artist’s diverse range of visual approaches and mediums—from advertising and branding, archival Civil Rights and apartheid-era photography, and sculpture, to public art projects and more.
For the Armchair Traveler
Tim Davis: I’m Looking Through You
Since 2017, Tim Davis has photographed throughout Los Angeles, creating an expansive visual poem celebrating the city’s glamorous surface. From closely observed details of LA’s social landscape to a host of absurd and otherworldly street encounters, Davis captures the surreal beauty, fierce energy, and hidden messages harbored in the streets of the City of Angels. “The camera is a machine that can see only surfaces,” Davis writes. “The world casts its spell, and the camera gobbles up its glamour, uncritically, with pure certainty, assuming there is nothing underneath.”
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.
In the winter of 1958, Sergio Larrain traveled to London. He spent just a few months there, photographing subjects that interested him and embracing the shadows of the city. In the cold and damp, his images captured a tangible darkness in which he could “materialize that world of phantoms.” This new edition of Larrain’s original and poetic visual volume London features previously unpublished photographs alongside texts by Agnès Sire and the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.
Caspian: The Elements by Chloe Dewe Mathews
Between 2010 and 2015, Chloe Dewe Mathews traveled through the beguiling region surrounding the Caspian Sea, creating a record of the ways materials such as oil, fire, uranium, and water are integral to the mystical, economic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. In photographs that range from stark and primordial to lush and mysterious, Dewe Mathews’s Caspian: The Elements is a powerful document of the ways humans are inextricably linked to this enigmatic and much-coveted land.
Children’s Activity and Educational Books
The Colors We Share by Angélica Dass
Inspired by her family tree, Angélica Dass—a Brazilian artist of African, European, and Native American descent—began creating portraits of people from all over the world against backgrounds that match their skin tones. Brought together in a book made for young readers, The Colors We Share celebrates the diverse beauty of human skin, while also considering concepts of race and the limited categories we use to describe each other.
Eyes Open: 23 Photography Projects for Curious Kids
Compiled by Susan Meiselas, Eyes Open is a sourcebook of photography ideas for kids to engage with the world through the camera. Broken into chapters ranging from “Alphabetography” to “Light,” “Movement,” “Neighborhood,” and more, each idea starts with a prompt, illustrated with pictures by students from around the world, and followed by the words and images of artists who share their ways of seeing. Playful and meaningful, this book is for young would-be photographers and those interested in expressing themselves creatively.
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 the medium—from light and gesture to composition—through the work of famous photographers such as William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, and Martin Parr.
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
Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (Limited-Edition Box Set)
Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases into her visually complex photographs that examine how images circulate online, as well as how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. This special limited-edition box set features a differentiated version of Cwynar’s debut monograph, Glass Life, accompanied by a signed print from the artist.
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; 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.
Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (Signed Book and Limited-Edition Print Bundle)
Between 1997 and 2002, Justine Kurland photographed teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism against the masculine myth of the American landscape. Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce—imagining a world at once lawless and utopian, an Eden in the wild. This bundle features a signed edition of her now-iconic series Girl Pictures and a signed and numbered limited-edition print from the book.
Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale for 30% off photobooks, magazines, and prints.
