Highlighting New Perspectives: Aperture Portfolio Prize

The annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to identify emerging trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. In a panel discussion moderated by Brendan Embser, senior editor of Aperture magazine, 2022 and 2019 winners Felipe Romero Beltrán and Mark Armijo McKnight, and 2023 finalist Samantha Box, will present their work and discuss their most recent artistic endeavors.

From photographing young immigrant men navigating legal limbo in Spain to reconstructing dreams through still lifes, these artists demonstrate the necessity of showcasing new and bold perspectives in the field of photography.

This virtual public program is free and open to all.

The 2024 Portfolio Prize call for entry is from November 17, 2023, to January 5, 2024. For more information about submitting your work, see here.

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Felipe Romero Beltrán is a Colombian photographer based in Paris. Beltran focuses on social issues, dealing with the tension that new narratives introduce in the field of documentary photography. He is currently preparing a PhD dissertation on photography at Complutense University of Madrid. His practice, characterized by its interest on social matters, is the result of long-term projects accompanied by extensive research on the subject.

Mark Armijo McKnight is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and reviewed in publications including the Los Angeles Times, Interview, the New Yorker, GQ, Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, and BOMB. McKnight is a Fulbright Scholar (2008–9), the recipient of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award, a 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. His second monograph, Posthume, will be published in 2024.  

Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. She holds an MFA in advanced photographic studies from ICP-Bard and a certificate in photojournalism and documentary studies from the International Center of Photography. She has been awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Photography twice. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Louis Roederer Discovery Award, and the Prix De La Photo Madame Figaro. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and the Harvard Art Museums.

Brendan Embser is senior editor of Aperture magazine. He is also editor of books including Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018), Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020), and Philip Montgomery: American Mirror (2021), among many others. Formerly director of exhibitions at the Walther Collection, New York, he has contributed essays and interviews to Apartamento, Contemporary And, n+1, Objektiv, and The PhotoBook Review. He holds an MA in Africana studies from New York University, and a BA in English from Haverford College, Pennsylvania.

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Image: Felipe Romero Beltrán, Hamza arrives, 2020; from the series Dialect