Aperture Releases “The Craft Issue”

New York, December 4, 2025—In a moment when so many images flood our screens, how can a photograph retain meaning and feel tangible? The artists featured in Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue,” releasing today, make photographs the slow way—building camera obscuras, making photograms, laboring in traditional darkrooms—to insist on the value of handmade, often unique images that frequently merge photography with other media, from ceramics and glass to collage.

In “The Craft Issue,” critic and curator Ekow Eshun interviews the polymath artist Theaster Gates about his founding of the Black Image Corporation and what it will take to craft new platforms and paradigms for a collective Black imaginary. Julia Halperin profiles Jungjin Lee, whose photographs on handmade mulberry paper conjure introspective landscapes charged with nuance and emotional depth, while Zoë Hopkins surveys the work of Troy Montes Michie, who makes collages that evoke fragments of queer history and desire.

Design critic Alice Rawsthorn explores the pioneering photographs of Lucia Moholy, who immortalized the Bauhaus in images that capture the school’s radical fusion of craftsmanship and industrial production. Alistair O’Neill interviews the directors of the Paris-based fashion brand Lemaire about their photographic inspirations and the narrative power of clothes, and the ceramicist and memoirist Edmund de Waal speaks to the editors about his collaboration with Sally Mann and what it’s meant to spend a life amid archives and vessels. And Michael Famighetti, Aperture’s editor in chief, sat down with Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz for a wide-ranging conversation about the physical labor of making pictures and the rewards of close attention, both out in the world and inside the darkroom.

This issue’s portfolios highlight artists who work against photography’s shibboleths of reproducibility and standardization, instead focusing on manual processes and unrepeatable forms. Erin Jane Nelson and Ann Weathersby meld photography, glass, textiles, and ceramics, constructing delicate reliquaries with no easy meanings. John Chiara builds room-sized camera obscuras, towing them around the United States like a modern-day Carleton Watkins, illuminating the facts, as the poet Dan Beachy-Quick writes, “of all it is we can’t make ourselves: sunlight, water, land; eyes, mind, life.”

The cover of “The Craft Issue” features a photogram by Aspen Mays, a Bay Area–based artist who makes her cameraless images in complete darkness, guided by sense memory and experimentation.

Photography has never felt cheaper, faster, and harder to believe in. Yet the artists in these pages represent another image world that’s also coming into view, one that favors slower burns and handed-down techniques—where the mind and the body work together to craft visions steeped in history, tradition, and memory, but exist in that increasingly rare thing, the here and now.

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Inside the Issue…
Columns & Features

AGENDA
Michella Bredahl, Boris Mikhailov, Alejandro Cartagena, Ralph Eugene Meatyard

BACKSTORY
Quinn Moreland on Mimi Plumb’s prophetic images of America on the edge

VIEWFINDER
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Karim Kal’s mysterious views of nighttime Algeria

STUDIO VISIT
Lucienne Bestall on Jo Ractliffe’s Cape Town workspace

CURRICULUM
Philip Montgomery on Sade, Borderland, and the LAPD Archive

ENDNOTE
Edmund de Waal on a life amid archives and vessels

EDITORS’ NOTE
The Craft Issue

THE POLEMICS OF CRAFT
Theaster Gates is making the most of the material world
A conversation with Ekow Eshun

LOOKING GLASS
Ann Weathersby holds a mirror to expanded female consciousness
Rebecca Bengal

THINGS AS THEY ARE
Jungjin Lee’s landscapes of introspection
Julia Halperin

HANDS TO HEAVENS
The darkroom alchemy of Aspen Mays
Mimi Zeiger

THE DEPTH OF A POCKET
Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran on fashion, movies, and everyday gestures
A conversation with Alistair O’Neill

A VISION OF HER OWN
How Lucia Moholy immortalized the Bauhaus
Alice Rawsthorn

STITCHES IN TIME
Troy Montes Michie’s collages conjure fragments of queer history and desire
Zoë Hopkins

ZEN AND THE ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz on attention, focus, and darkroom magic
A conversation with Michael Famighetti

HYBRIDS
Erin Jane Nelson fuses ceramics and photography
Eli Cohen

TREASURE ISLAND
John Chiara’s custom camera obscuras illuminate the world’s simple mysteries
Dan Beachy-Quick

The PhotoBook Review

IDEAS OF AFRICA
Brendan Embser speaks with curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo

TURN-ON
Natasha Stagg visits Climax Books in New York

GOOD VIBRATIONS
Vince Aletti on Mark Borthwick’s early fashion photography

Reviews of photobooks by Nick Haymes, Nikolay Bakharev, Alanna Fields, Donna Gottschalk, and Yung Lean

Support has been provided by members of Aperture’s Magazine Council: Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelovic, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, and Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, MUUS Collection.

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About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through its acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.

Aperture’s programs and operations are made possible by the generosity of our board of trustees, our members, and other individuals, and with major support from 7G Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, Documentary Arts, Ford Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Marta Heflin Foundation, Ishibashi Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Henry Luce Foundation, Mailman Foundation, MurthyNAYAK Foundation, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, San Francisco Foundation, Thomas R. Schiff Foundation, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Stuart B. Cooper and R. L. Besson, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, Thomas and Susan Dunn, Agnes Gund, Michael Sonnenfeldt, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts, with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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Press Contact
Lauren Van Natten, publicity@aperture.org