Artist Talk with Juan Brenner

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the photography program at Parsons School of Design at The New School, is pleased to present an online artist talk with Juan Brenner.

After working in New York as a fashion photographer for over a decade, Brenner returned to his native Guatemala, where he began making work about the people and complex territory in the country’s Western Highlands. For his latest series, Genesis, Brenner turns his attention to the youth and the critical shift taking place in the Highlands. From photographs of intricate details and objects, to powerful portraits and landscapes, Genesis is a project the artist describes as “about the future . . . I can’t predict what’s going to happen, I can only document what’s going on now and, to me, it looks like a decisive tipping point.”

Brenner’s work is featured in the Fall 2021 issue of Aperture magazine, “Cosmologies,” in which photographers explore the idea of cosmologies through their origins, histories, and local universes. Read more here.

Juan Brenner (born in Guatemala City, 1977) lived and worked in New York for more than a decade as a fashion photographer. His images have been published in international magazines including Nylon, Style and the Family Tunes, People, Oyster, L’Uomo Vogue, BON, and Anthem. He is a founding member of Proyectos Ultravioleta in Guatemala City. His project MACÚ (in collaboration with Byron Mármol) was included in the book CLAP! 10×10 Contemporary Latin American Photobooks: 2000–2016 (2017). Brenner’s first monograph, Tonatiuh (2019), was shortlisted for the 2019 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award. For the same project, he was a winner of LensCulture’s 2019 Emerging Talent Award.

Image by Juan Brenner

Support for this program is provided by MPB, the platform to buy, sell and trade in used photo and video kits.