Untitled, from the series Bettina’s Color-aid papers with 1970s Aperture issues, 2022

The photography of the 1970s was marked by competing visions, looking both forward and backward in time. Aperture’s entry into the decade, with a Spring 1970 issue on early French photography, mined the medium’s austere origins in the previous century, while the emotive force of more immediate “snapshots” by Garry Winogrand, Nancy Rexroth, and Joel Meyerowitz collected just a few years later, in the Fall 1974 issue, confronted us with the medium’s potential and scope. In framing this range, the magazine, too, wore many faces through the decade, featuring monographs, thematic explorations, and shifts in appearance. “The size, the format, the design all changed across the 1970s issues,” remarks Yto Barrada, revisiting Aperture’s archive. “I tried to follow the object,” she explains, “to trust the directions given by it and its encounter with the other objects in my studio.” The other objects, in this case, were Color-aid cards of the late artist Bettina Grossman, whose work spanning sculpture, painting, photography, and textile design has only recently gained wider recognition, in large part because of Barrada. Placing and photographing the decade’s issues against the faux leather of her studio table, Barrada composes images from the material remnants of Bettina’s color paper cutouts, the kind often used by artists and designers. Inspired by Bettina’s approach and the magazine’s history, Barrada’s recompositions are also re-formations, attempts at a new grammar, yielding unexpected associations. “I first chose to conceal the photographs and then began to compose in an automatic way,” Barrada reflects, “like an exquisite corpse.” This special limited-edition print is from a series of works commissioned for Aperture magazine #248: “The 70th Anniversary Issue”.

Pigment Print
Image Size: 18 x 27 inches
Paper Size: 24 x 32 1/4 inches
Edition of 10 + 3 AP
Signed and numbered by the artist