Edition for Aperture, 2022 from the series Compositions, 2022

For Iñaki Bonillas, photography is a form of archaeology. An artist who rarely makes images out in the world, Bonillas instead finds pictures that he clips, crops, and scales up to create new works offering enigmatic narratives. During his deep dive into issues from Aperture’s first decade of publishing—the 1950s, an era before photography had cemented its status as an art—Bonillas was struck by how the magazine, through its rigorous writing and exquisitely reproduced portfolios, endeavored to make the case for the richness, complexity, and expressive possibilities of the medium. From an essay by Nancy Newhall on image captions, citing Dorothea Lange’s skillful use of language, to technically oriented writings on Ansel Adams’s Zone System, the magazine brought readers defining articles that vibrated with the conviction of a manifesto. Bonillas combines snippets of text and iconic images in a series of collages that feature open-ended statements and observations. “I’m an artist who is constantly asking what my main medium, photography, can still be, as art, in a time when photographic images flood our lives,” he says. “In that sense, I feel very close to those in the 1950s who were, in a way, asking the same pressing questions. Photography as an art form is not something that I, in the twenty-first century, can take for granted—and neither could they, seventy years ago.” This special limited-edition print is from a series of works commissioned for Aperture magazine #248: “The 70th Anniversary Issue”.

Pigment Print on cotton paper (Hahnemühle William Turner, 190 gr) inside a four-flap folder
8 x 6.2 in / 20.3 x 15.7 cm (folded)
8 x 55.5 in / 20.3 x 141 cm (extended)
8 x 39.4 in / 20.3 x 100 cm (accordion fold display)
Edition of 20 + 5 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist