Online
Aperture: A History of Photobook Firsts
Thursday, October 12
6:00 p.m. - 7:15 p.m. BST
1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. EDT
Join Aperture and the Victoria and Albert Museum for a virtual conversation with Lesley A. Martin, Aperture editor at large, and Fiona Rogers, curator of the Parasol Foundation Women in Photography project, as they explore Aperture’s seventy-year history, with a particular focus on publishing “first books”—an artist’s initial foray into photobook making.
Aperture supports the discovery and support of emerging talent through both its eponymous quarterly magazine and in publishing over seven hundred photographic titles, many of them an artist’s first, including Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture, 1986) and Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 1972.)
Aperture is the first guest curator of the V&A’s new browsing library, situated in the Kusuma Gallery, a new space within the Photography Centre dedicated to celebrating the relationship between photography and the book. Aperture’s curation, led by Martin, features a series of “firsts,” featuring first-time artist monographs from Aperture’s historic and contemporary collection. Learn more on the V&A blog.
Advance registration is required. Please register here.
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Lesley A. Martin is Aperture’s editor at large. She is editor of more than one hundred photobooks and counting, including On the Beach by Richard Misrach (2007); LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family (2014); Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2017); and The New Black Vanguard by Antwaun Sargent (2019). She was founder and publisher of The PhotoBook Review throughout its ten-year run. Lesley’s writing has been published in IMA magazine, FOAM, and Aperture. In 2012, she cofounded the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards and, in 2020, she received the Royal Photographic Society Award for outstanding achievement in photographic publishing. Lesley is currently a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.Fiona Rogers is the inaugural Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a new international curatorial program that supports women in photography across the museum’s acquisitions, commissions, research, education, displays, and events. She was previously director of photography and operations at Webber, a photographic agency and gallery with offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Prior to Webber, she worked for Magnum Photos in a variety of roles, including chief operations officer.
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Image: Diane Arbus, Woman with a veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C., 1968; from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2011)
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