Inaugural Aperture | IFA Photo Assembly

Aperture and the Institute of Fine Arts are partnering to establish a series of conversations that center photography as a creative act and means of responding to urgent questions in the world around us. This convening of photo-committed makers and thinkers will foster a critical yet community-oriented environment for reflection and learning. We aim to create a forum for exchange on why photography matters, even if, or especially because, its definition is elusive and its boundaries are porous. We will subsequently share digital recordings to offer broader access to these ideas and insights with photo-curious audiences.

Our first Photo Assembly will be held on Thursday, May 11. As a point of departure, we will consider Rebecca Bengal’s writing about photography, with many of her essays to be published by Aperture this spring in Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists. Rebecca will be joined by artist RaMell Ross in a conversation addressing the personal and political narratives of photographs and our relationship with them. Following this conversation, we will open the room to a moderated discussion.

Live participation is limited to invite-only. Post-event recordings will be publicly accessible via our YouTube channel.

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Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction, essays, and documentary journalism about art, literature, film, music, and the environment. A regular contributor to Aperture, her writing has been published by the Paris Review, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection, among many others. She has contributed stories and essays to books by Carolyn Drake, Justine Kurland, Kristine Potter, Paul Graham, Danny Lyon, and Charles Portis. A MacDowell fellow in fiction and a former editor at American Short Fiction, DoubleTake, and Vogue, she holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Originally from western North Carolina, Bengal lives in Brooklyn.

RaMell Ross (b. 1982) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. His work has appeared in places like Aperture; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, was a 2020 USA Artist Fellow, and a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University. His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and 2020 Peabody Award. It was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. RaMell holds degrees in sociology and English from Georgetown University and is associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department.

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Image: RaMell Ross, Here , 2012, from the series South County, AL (a Hale County), 2012–14; from Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists by Rebecca Bengal (Aperture, 2023). Courtesy the artist

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