Aperture to Honor Deana Lawson and Hiroshi Sugimoto at the 2026 Gala

This year’s celebration takes place at the American Museum of Natural History, in the heart of the Upper West Side, where Aperture opened its new permanent home at 380 Columbus Avenue on September 18, 2026.

As part of the event, live and silent auctions will take place. The silent auction will feature artwork by more than a dozen artists who have been closely intertwined with Aperture’s publishing history, including Dawoud Bey, Lee Friedlander, and Justine Kurland. The live auction will feature lots, including a gelatin-silver print by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Orpheum, California, from his renowned Theaters series; a one-of-a-kind photograph from Richard Learoyd’s Flowers series; an unprecedented opportunity to sit for a commissioned portrait by Tina Barney, whose Fashion monograph (Aperture, 2026) was just released; a night aboard Belmond’s legendary Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, traveling from Venice to Paris; and a private artist-led tour of Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love You on view at the Guggenheim Museum.

As Aperture’s most significant fundraising event of the year, the Gala provides vital support of Aperture’s programming and publications, and celebrates the mission to create insight, community, and understanding through photography. The 2026 Gala comes at a pivotal moment in the publisher’s seventy-four-year history and stands as a testament to the spirit of community that anchors and inspires Aperture’s work.

Deana Lawson is one of the most influential photographers of her generation. In meticulously staged portraiture, assemblages, and otherworldly holograms, Lawson has created a visionary language to contemplate identity and ritual, establishing a body of work where lived and imaginary experiences blur and interpretations are never fixed. Lawson guest edited Aperture’s Fall 2024 issue, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” which refracts themes of family, social history, and the astrophysical through past and contemporary photography. Her work is the subject of the acclaimed Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018) and is featured in Aperture Loves New York, the inaugural installation at Aperture’s new home, on view through November 1, 2026.

Across a six-decade career, Hiroshi Sugimoto has redefined the metaphysical possibilities of the still image. Through photography, architecture, sculpture, and performance, he has continuously probed the limits of perception and time in formally rigorous, experimental projects such as Seascapes or Theaters, his landmark series of long-exposure black-and-white photographs. Soon after his arrival in New York, in 1974, he began Dioramas (1975–ongoing), his first photographic series: large-format images of the habitat dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. Sugimoto is the guest editor of Aperture’s Fall 2026 issue, “Stop Time.”

Tickets are available through Bowen & CO. at 914.231.6180 or aperture@bowenandco.com.

For more information, visit aperture.org.

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