Aperture 254 - Spring 2024

Counter Histories

This spring, Aperture presents “Counter Histories,” an issue produced in collaboration with Magnum Foundation and informed by their ongoing Counter Histories grant initiative, featuring artists from around the world who tell new stories about how the past informs the present.

Subscribe and Save $19.96

In stock

Contributors
Add to cart
Product Image 0Product Image 1Product Image 2Product Image 3Product Image 4Product Image 5Product Image 6Product Image 7

Featured Content


Issue Details

Aperture Releases “Counter Histories,” Produced with Magnum Foundation

Spring Issue Presents Photographers Who Uncover Personal and Political Histories

(New York—March 6, 2024) What creative possibilities are offered by the gaps, absences, and silences in historical records? This spring, Aperture magazine presents “Counter Histories,” an issue produced in collaboration with Magnum Foundation and informed by their ongoing Counter Histories grant initiative, featuring photographers from around the world who tell powerful stories about complex social and political histories.

The issue will be launched at Magnum Foundation in New York in conjunction with an exhibition (on view from April 3 to June 26) featuring several of the photographers featured in the magazine whose work intervenes in state image archives. A second, related exhibition, presenting Counter Histories projects responding to family archives, will be on view at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, in Kingston, New York, from March 23 to May 26.

In the “Counter Histories” issue, a global group of photographers questions dominant historical narratives to create layered portrayals of place, culture, and community. In Hong Kong, Billy H.C. Kwok collaborates with a grieving mother desperately searching for her son. In Nepal, Prasiit Sthapit investigates the complex role of musicians in the country’s Maoist insurrection. Alice Proujansky looks at her parents’ past as New Left activists in the United States, while Christopher Gregory-Rivera examines how Puerto Rican independence activists were surveilled for decades. And, in the years before Poland ousted a far-right government last fall, Agata Szymanska-Medina exposed how a nationalist party worked steadily to undermine an independent judiciary.

For these artists, family and community are as essential as politics and memory. Stories of migration from Haiti to Philadelphia inspire Naomieh Jovin’s vibrant collages honoring her elders. Cédrine Scheidig engages with legacies of the Black diaspora, tracing her relationship to Afro-Caribbean history and community in French Guiana. In the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Lindokuhle Sobekwa reflects on the movement of Black migrant labor and builds what he describes as a “family tree” of the country. And Abdo Shanan, working in Algeria, builds a speculative archive for his own generation.

“Building upon Magnum Foundation’s important work supporting documentary storytellers across the world, this issue considers how photographers, through an engagement with archives or by their own observational work, can present and examine contested histories in a fresh, imaginative way,” said Michael Famighetti, Editor in Chief, Aperture magazine.

“More than just a topic or theme, we see ‘Counter Histories’ as an expanded and collaborative approach to historical inquiry and photographic storytelling,” Kristen Lubben, Magnum Foundation’s Executive Director said. “Revisiting and reframing the past in the context of the present, the artists featured in this project challenge the power structures embedded in archives and suggest the radical possibilities of alternative narratives.”

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 128
Number of images: 0
Publication date: 2024-03-05
Measurements: 9.25 x 12 inches
ISBN: 9781597115667


Support has been provided by members of Aperture’s Magazine Council: Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, and Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, MUUS Collection.

The “Counter Histories” issue of Aperture magazine is produced in partnership with the Magnum Foundation.

Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories initiative is supported by The Henry Luce Foundation. Additional support for Counter Histories is provided by The Fledgling Fund, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowships, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Table Of Contents

Front

Agenda
Takuma Nakahira, David Seidner, David Goldblatt, Women in Revolt!

Viewfinder
Marigold Warner revisits Mariko Mori’s critique of gender roles in Japan

Dispatches
Aaron Peck on the future of Vancouver as an artist’s city

Backstory
Iva Dixit on Ketaki Sheth’s candid portraits of Indian film stars at work

Curriculum
Jack Pierson on Martin Scorsese, Bobbi Boyle, and a history of homoerotic photography

Studio Visit
Jordan Stein speaks with Jim Goldberg about his magnum opus

Words

For So Many Years When I Close My Eyes
A mother’s search for her lost son inspires Billy H.C. Kwok’s new work
Ken Chen

We See It All
Christopher Gregory-Rivera’s investigation into the surveillance of Puerto Rican activists
Yxta Maya Murray

Moonsongs for Earth
Prasiit Sthapit delves into the role of music in Nepal’s Maoist revolution
Muna Gurung

Fighting Times
How Alice Proujansky came to terms with her parents’ radical past
Piper French

Pictures

The Country
Through vivid landscapes and portraits, Lindokuhle Sobekwa maps a family tree in South Africa
Kwanele Sosibo

Searching for Cayenne
Cédrine Scheidig asks where the history of the Caribbean begins and ends
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The “Good” Change
Agata Szymanska-Medina exposes the forces repressing Polish democracy
Camila McHugh

The Right to a Memory
In Algeria, Abdo Shanan builds an archive about ordinary citizens
Tausif Noor

Descendants
Naomieh Jovin tells an intergenerational family story, from Haiti to the United States
Edwidge Danticat

Back

The PhotoBook Review
A tour of Ari Marcopoulos’s personal library, Simon Wu on Pati Hill’s shape-shifting xerography, and reviews of photobooks by Hans Wilschut, Lin Zhipeng, David Wojnarowicz, Aaron Turner, and RaMell Ross

Endnote
Six questions for Patrick Radden Keefe


Other Issues