Meet the Artists: Creating Stories for Tomorrow

Watch a recording of the event here.

This past year, Aperture and FUJIFILM commissioned five emerging photographers to each create a body of work in response to the question: What does tomorrow look like? From documenting the current political state in the US, to protests in Chile, to the intimate and beautiful in New York, the photographers captured moments that reflect on what the future could hold. In this conversation, Brendan Embser, senior managing editor of Aperture magazine, will speak with Javier Álvarez, Gus Aronson, Widline Cadet, Yu-Chen Chiu, and Silvana Trevale about their work and what “tomorrow” looks like for them.

This event is part of Creating Stories for Tomorrow, a series produced in partnership with FUJIFILM.

Javier Álvarez (born in Santiago, Chile, 1988) is a documentary photographer focused on social issues and human rights in neglected communities. After completing a BFA in photography in Santiago, Álvarez worked as a freelance editorial and press photographer for agencies in São Paulo and Santiago. In addition to his personal and commissioned work, he is a contributor to the Brazilian activist and independent journalistic platform Mídia NINJA.

Gus Aronson (born in New York, 1998) is a photographer and filmmaker based in the Bronx. Embracing ambiguous narrative and vivid color as tools to push against ideas of the document, Aronson rejects the notion that photographs are purely evidence of a time past. He explores how they rather function as tarot cards: both relics of the past and roadmaps for the future. After graduating from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in May 2020, he completed commissions for Aperture and Elle magazines, and was part of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open exhibition, Information, at Fotografiska New York.

Widline Cadet (born in Pétion-Ville, Haiti, 1992) is an artist whose practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, and Haitian cultural identity in the United States. She uses photography, video, and installation to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hypervisibility, Black feminine interiority, and selfhood. Cadet is recipient of a number of fellowships, residencies, and awards, including a 2020 Lit List award, 2020 Museum of Contemporary Photography Snider Prize, and 2020 NYFA/JGS Fellowship for Photography. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, TIME, and Wallpaper*, among other publications. She earned her BA in studio art from the City College of New York, and her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She is currently based in New York as a 2020–21 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Yu-Chen Chiu (born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan) is a lens-based artist currently living in Brooklyn. She takes a poetic approach to telling stories about migration and belonging. Raised in Taiwan, she has spent half her life in the United States. Her experience as an immigrant with internalized cultural conflict has strongly influenced her artistic approach. In 2018, Chiu was recipient of an En Foco Photography Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Fotografiska New York; the South Street Seaport Museum, New York; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; and Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Silvana Trevale (born in Caracas, Venezuela) is a photographer based in London. Her portrait-based work is a fusion between documentary and fashion. The escalating crisis in her home country motivated her to produce the series Venezuelan Youth, which was presented at her 2020 solo show at theprintspace Gallery, London, and at Vogue Italia’s Photo Vogue Festival 2020. Trevale has returned to Venezuela every year since 2017 to document the lives of women, teenagers, and children in a time of economic, social, and political unrest. She has also taken a closer look at her own family, collaborating remotely with her grandmother and mother to research and communicate their stories—a love letter to Latin American mothers. Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Trevale has recently been evoking childhood memories from London—of the ocean, the sun, and the warmth of the people of Venezuela.