Aperture Releases Elle Pérez: Devotions

New York, September 22, 2026—This September, Aperture releases Elle Pérez: Devotions, the artist’s first monograph.

Love, heartache, pleasure, pain—Elle Pérez has emerged as a defining voice of their generation, making disarmingly intimate images that portray states of emotional intensity and physical transformation. In their debut photobook Devotions, Pérez traces the origins of their influential work through diaristic reproductions of writings, postcards, screenshots, reference articles, and research materials that inform their singular artistic vision and display the idealism of the studio. At the center of the book is a series of their most important portraits from 2009 to the present, many of which are now part of museum collections across the United States.

A winner of the Rome Prize whose work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, Pérez started out as a teenager photographing underground spaces around New York, where they produced a tender and vivid record of unalloyed freedom. Since then, their work has ranged from striking portraits of friends and lovers to gladiatorial photographs of wrestlers, crystalline landscapes and still lifes, and sprawling multimedia collages that incorporate influences from across art and literature. “These photographs are a result of a very direct human exchange,” Pérez says. “Trust is the goal. Trust is my formal strategy.”

Devotions includes an essay by the curator Dean Daderko, who describes the recent history of Pérez’s technically precise, carefully choreographed images, and a profile by the writer Sylvie McNamara that considers Pérez’s relentless desire to see the world anew and make meaning through photography. A deeply personal debut that imagines a world of desire and vulnerability, Devotions confirms Pérez’s mastery of the fine balance between document and imagination, perception and performance.

In celebration of the publication, Aperture hosts a book launch at its new home at 380 Columbus Avenue in New York with Elle Pérez on Wednesday, September 23, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. EDT. Pre-signed copies of Devotions will be available for purchase. Aperture’s executive director, Sarah Meister, will join the artist alongside Catherine Opie to discuss Devotions as part of the Aperture PhotoBook Club, held online on Monday, October 26, 7 p.m. EDT. Free with registration, more information is available at aperture.org/events.

Elle Pérez: Devotions is published by Aperture and available at aperture.org.

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Elle Pérez (born in the Bronx, 1989) is a photographer based in New York. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; MoMA PS1, Public Art Fund, and American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Their work was presented in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Venice Biennale and featured at the Barbican Centre, London; Brooklyn Museum; and Renaissance Society, Chicago. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Pérez is an assistant professor and critic in photography at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

Dean Daderko is the chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.

Sylvie McNamara is a staff writer at the Washingtonian.

This project was made possible, in part, with generous support from Stuart B. Cooper and Becky Besson. Aperture also wishes to thank Michael Hoeh for his contribution. For their support related to the printing of Elle Pérez: Devotions, Aperture extends additional thanks to Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

 

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About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From our new home at 380 Columbus Avenue in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through our 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 Bobby Campbell Charitable Fund, Coach, David Dechman and Michel Mercure, Susan and Thomas Dunn, FotoFocus, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Celso M. Gonzalez-Falla, William Talbot Hillman Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Mailman Foundation, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, James McKinney, Richard and Ronay Menschel, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold, Neuberger Berman, New York City Council, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Ms. Eliot Nolen of the Mary P. Oenslager Foundation Fund, Yesim and Dusty Philip, Theodore and Mary Jo Shen, Diane Sherman, Michael W. Sonnenfeldt/MUUS Collection, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

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Press Contact:
Lauren Van Natten, Aperture, publicity@aperture.org