December 16, 2025
Aperture Announces New Books for Spring 2026
Tracing the formation of an essential American artist, Hal Fischer: Seminal Works features Fischer’s rarely seen early photography along with the iconic series Gay Semiotics, a photo-text project in the late 1970s that categorized denizens of the Castro and Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods by social type such as the “jock” or the “hippie.” The monograph includes a range of essays that offer vital new perspectives on the history of San Francisco and the resonance of the gay rights movement across generations. Publication date: February 2026.
Kinship & Community
Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive
Kinship & Community presents an inspiring example of collective self-representation from the final decades of official segregation in the United States. With a wide array of images of everyday Black life—created by Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a proud but overlooked regional culture while testifying to the power of photography as a social tool.
Commissioned for the book is a vivid new photographic essay by Rahim Fortune that takes up the archive’s legacy and places it firmly in the present tense. Publication date: March 2026.
In his first Aperture monograph, Life Still, Lee Friedlander (born in Aberdeen, Washington, 1934) reimagines the presentation of his oeuvre at age ninety-one, bringing together rarely seen and unpublished images from the past sixty years alongside new work. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hua Hsu observes how these stubborn paradoxes of the American consciousness— the irony, humor, and self-conflict—remain as vivid today as they always have been. By seeing contradictions in the commonplace, Friedlander presents us with a book of enduring riddles about American culture. Publication date: March 2026.
Dionne Lee (born in New York) makes work across photography, video, and collage spanning themes of dispossession, loss, survival, and resilience. Lee’s formal interventions and innovative darkroom techniques—including rephotographing found imagery from wilderness survival manuals and using graphite pencils to create inscriptions on her photographs of the landscape—weave together new narratives that reclaim the great outdoors. Covering more than a decade of her work, Dionne Lee: Currents is the artist’s first monograph and features an interview with Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and contributions by curator Eric Booker and poet Camille T. Dungy. Publication date: April 2026.
The first comprehensive English-language survey of Ishiuchi Miyako (born in Kiryū, Japan, 1947), Traces is an indispensable introduction to one of the most influential figures in Japanese photography. Ishiuchi has examined the traces of personal and social histories for more than half a century, photographing locations connected to the ongoing US military presence in her hometown of Yokosuka, and, later, subjects including the personal effects of her deceased mother and haunting garments held in the collection of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Publication date: May 2026.
Over the course of fifty-plus years, Josef Koudelka (born in Moravia, Czech Republic, 1938) has kept nearly seventy journals. Distilled now into one richly illustrated volume, with diary page facsimiles, photographs, and self-portraits, Josef Koudelka: Diaries offers a look inside the mind of the iconoclastic Czech photographer renowned for his life in exile and a career that has included legendary projects on the Roma, the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Prague, and the often-devastating impact humans have on the landscape. Publication date: May 2026.
Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures
Renowned for her boldly intimate portraits of everyday Puerto Ricans in New York City, Sophie Rivera (1938–2021) began her career in the 1970s, becoming part of a coalition of artists who sought to counter negative depictions of Latinos in US popular culture.
Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, fully bilingual in English and Spanish, coincides with a major exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, New York, opening in April. The publication features portraits, cityscapes, graffiti-art photographs, and experimental self-portraits alongside vivid new scholarship that places Rivera at the center of Latine and feminist art, as well as within the history of contemporary photography in the United States. Publication date: June 2026.
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About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through its acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.
Aperture’s programs and operations are made possible by the generosity of our board of trustees, our members, and other individuals, and with major support from 7G Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, Documentary Arts, Ford Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Marta Heflin Foundation, Ishibashi Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Henry Luce Foundation, Mailman Foundation, MurthyNAYAK Foundation, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, San Francisco Foundation, Thomas R. Schiff Foundation, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Stuart B. Cooper and R. L. Besson, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, Thomas and Susan Dunn, Agnes Gund, Michael Sonnenfeldt, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts, with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
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For press images, review copies, or to request interviews with artists or editors, contact Lauren Van Natten at publicity@aperture.org.