Aperture Presents the First Monograph by Celebrated Fashion and Art Photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis

Aperture is pleased to announce the publication of Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive, the first major monograph dedicated to a rising artist known for making unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. Showcasing Bobb-Willis’s eye for vibrant color and conceptual image building, Keep the Kid Alive is a vivid statement about beauty, exuberance, and cathartic expression.

Keep the Kid Alive invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses choreographed by the artist. Bobb- Willis transforms the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaus, often casting subjects and styling shoots herself. “I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way,” Bobb-Willis says. “It’s important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.”

Alongside Bobb-Willis’s photography, the book features an essay by the writer and scholar Tiana Reid, an illuminating interview by the editor Nicole Acheampong, and a series of fourteen conversations with artists, stylists, and creatives, including notable figures such as Micaiah Carter, Howardena Pindell, Tschabalala Self, and Alex Webb, who each speak about keeping their “inner kid” alive. The publication is edited by Brendan Embser, senior editor at Aperture, with support from Noa Lin, assistant editor, and is available at aperture.org/books.

Arielle Bobb-Willis (born in New York, 1994) has published her photography in the New Yorker, i-D, W, British Journal of Photography, L’uomo Vogue, New York, and the New York Times Magazine. Her work is featured in The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019) and the accompanying exhibition, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, Rencontres d’Arles, France, and Fotografiska Stockholm, among others. Her work is also featured in As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021) and the associated traveling exhibition, and group exhibitions at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center; Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland; and Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University in Toronto, where she teaches Black literature. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Bookforum, the Nation, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and Teen Vogue, among other publications.

Nicole Acheampong is the digital editor at T Magazine. A former editor at the Atlantic and Aperture, where she worked on photobooks by Nigel Poor, Wendy Red Star, and Ming Smith, her writing has appeared in Art in America and the New York Review of Books.