Aperture Spring Issue Illuminates the Evolving Exchange between Photography & Painting

(New York—March 13, 2025) – How has the relationship between painting and photography evolved since the invention of the latter nearly two centuries ago? This spring, Aperture presents “Photography & Painting,” featuring artists from around the world who draw inspiration from both mediums in their work, illuminating how the dialogue between camera and canvas continues to unfold today in fascinating, unexpected ways.

Aperture No. 258 is anchored by three in-depth conversations with Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Vija Celmins, and Christopher Wool—three of the most significant painters of their generations. Through different strategies, these artists integrate photographic surfaces into their work, collapsing mediums to find new ways of marking time and space and of expanding our sense of how memories can be represented, from Akunyili Crosby’s spellbinding meditations on Nigerian culture incorporating family and found photographs; to Christopher Wool’s conceptual images of urban decay, talismanic objects, and his own abstract paintings; to Vija Celmins’s painstaking renderings of ocean waves and galaxies. As Celmins tells the photographer Richard Learoyd, “My tools are like hours.”

Rather than treat painting and photography as rivals, this issue frames them as sources of mutual inspiration. Brian Dillon examines photographers’ abiding fascination with the painter’s studio, drawing connections among Luigi Ghirri’s pictures of Giorgio Morandi’s atelier, Collier Schorr’s portraits of Nicole Eisenman, and Sally Mann’s tender trespass into Cy Twombly’s Virginia workspace. David Campany looks at the surprising resonances between gestural painting and photography in the 1950s, while Lucy Ives reflects on the misunderstood legacy of photorealism, showing how a movement long disparaged by critics continues to exert a powerful influence on younger artists. Elsewhere in the issue, Lynne Tillman rediscovers the photography of Pierre Bonnard, while Jarrett Earnest—looking at recent paintings of Britney Spears, Casablanca stills, and Judy Garland’s Dorothy—asks: Why are so many contemporary painters remaking famous images right now? And portfolios by Poppy Jones, Lia Darjes, and Shirana Shahbazi use painterly references to offer meditations on the past that reject nostalgia for more mysterious, unsettled attitudes toward memory.

The cover of Aperture No. 258 features a 2021 work by Kunié Sugiura, whose hybrid, dreamlike forms have tested the limits of photographic expression for nearly six decades. Made of painted color blocks and X-rays of her body as well as those of strangers—transfixed by the X-ray’s spectra representations of the human form, she collected them while hospitalized in the 1990s and printed them in her own darkroom—the work is Sugiura’s first large-scale grid, and can be configured in various ways.

In an essay coinciding with the retrospective of Sugiura’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the curator Erin O’Toole traces the artist’s career through its trials and triumphs. “We live in an age of images, an age of too-muchness, including a flood of art,” the editors write. “After around two hundred years of coexistence, photography and painting are still talking, still defining each other through an exchange of mark making and an examination of the surfaces around us that sometimes allows for fuller—and slower—experiences.”

Inside the issue:
Columns & Features

EDITORS’ NOTE
Photography & Painting

ENDLESS RETURNS
The painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby bends time with found and family images
A conversation with Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi

IN THE STUDIO
How photographers have mythologized the painter’s worksite
Brian Dillon

BONNARD’S CAMERA
The radiant impressions of Pierre Bonnard
Lynne Tillman

VANITAS
Lia Darjes’s scavenged still lifes
Jesse Dorris

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID
Why are so many contemporary painters remaking famous images?
Jarrett Earnest

SEE STOP RUN PRINT
Christopher Wool reflects on his images and books
A conversation with Carrie Springer

PALIMPSEST
Shirana Shahbazi’s polychrome dreamworlds
Negar Azimi

ABSTRACTION AS EVENT. EVENT AS ABSTRACTION.
How did midcentury painting and photography speak to each other?
David Campany

SOUVENIRS
The shadowy revelations of Poppy Jones
Durga Chew-Bose

PHOTOREALISM’S LIVING HISTORY
Rediscovering the expansiveness of a movement in painting
Lucy Ives

LIQUID LIGHT
Kunié Sugiura’s genre-blending vision
Erin O’Toole

LIVING COLOR
Alice Wong’s overpaintings and the aesthetics of access
Mara Mills

THE SURFACE OF THINGS
Vija Celmins on a life of close looking and mark making
A conversation with Richard Learoyd

AGENDA
Linder, American Photography, Kyotographie, Lucia Moholy

BACKSTORY
Jane’a Johnson on Hood Century modernism

VIEWFINDER
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Sakir Khader’s intimate record of conflict

TIMELINE
Wendy A. Grossman on portrayals of African art

STUDIO VISIT
Seb Emina on Lise Sarfati’s Parisian atelier

CURRICULUM
Mohamed Bourouissa on Joseph Beuys, Alice Diop, and TIF

ENDNOTE
Amy Sherald on the American sublime

The PhotoBook Review
BREAK IT DOWN
Larissa Pham on the Vietnamese American New Wave

COVER STORIES
Russet Lederman on photobook covers that break the rules

THE ONLY GAME
Chiara Bardelli Nonino talks Bruno Munari with Jason Fulford
Reviews of photobooks by Yumna Al-Arashi, Larry Clark, Lars Tunbjörk, and more

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

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.

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Press Contact
Lauren Van Natten, +1.212.946.7151, publicity@aperture.org