Essays

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Guadalupe Rosales’s Archive of Chicano Life in Los Angeles

Collecting images and posting them to Instagram, the artist creates space for an alternative history of youth culture.

Demanding Justice for Shahidul Alam

In Bangladesh, the brutal arrest of a prominent photographer incites an international outcry.

At Least They’ll See the Black

In two recent films, Kahlil Joseph and Arthur Jafa consider the poetics of African American life.

What's In An Image?

Sharing, surveillance, and data are changing the way we look and see.

If Photographs Could Talk

How has an experimental platform for photographers created a new form of image making?

The Woman Behind the First Photography Gallery

Helen Gee risked everything to open Limelight in 1954, selling prints by Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Robert Frank.

How to Witness Nothing (and Everything)

Photographer Edmund Clark and historian Crofton Black trace a network of black-site prisons.

The Fragility of Existence

With uncompromising directness, Margaret Courtney-Clarke photographs the lives and landscapes of Namibia.

Framing Justice

How do photographs tell the story of citizenship in the United States?

Peter Hujar's Italian Reverie

From the underground art star, a delicate picture of youth.

The Honesty of Petra Collins

The young photographer is celebrated for her raw and real depictions of femininity. But can images ever be trusted?

Take the J Train

In Andre D. Wagner’s new photobook, an intimate chronicle of black life on New York City’s subways.

Jamie Hawkesworth Doesn’t Believe in Boundaries

A rising photography star bridges the divide between art and fashion.

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2001

The Cult of Walter Pfeiffer

Delighting in male beauty and gender play, a prolific Swiss photographer reinvented the rules of attraction.

The Queen Unleashed

Lyle Ashton Harris’s archive offers a glimpse of a queer, black ’90s.

At FotoFocus, the Radical Notion That Women Are People

Are we living in a state of emergency feminism?

A Different Kind of Protest

How did Michael Schmidt’s independent workshop change postwar German photography?

You Can Never Be Too Rich

Americans were supposed to break free of the class system. But, in Lauren Greenfield’s chronicle of American wealth, the desire for status is insatiable.
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Aperture No. 257

Aperture presents “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI,” a timely and urgent issue that explores how artificial intelligence is quickly transforming the field of photography and our broader culture of images.

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