Jump Ahead:
The Year in Interviews
The Year in Portfolios
The Year in Essays

The Year in Interviews

Heinkuhn Oh’s People of the Twenty-First Century
A conversation with Hyunjung Son, from Aperture No. 261, “The Seoul Issue”

In mural-scale portraits of high schoolers, soldiers, and other social types, Heinkuhn Oh subtly dramatizes tensions between collective and personal identity in Korean society. “I don’t try to create complex gazes—I find people who naturally possess them,” says Oh. “My role then becomes creating the trust needed for them to reveal their authentic selves to the camera.”

The Darkroom Master Keeping Diane Arbus’s Spirit Alive
A conversation with Lesley A. Martin

Neil Selkirk, photographer and darkroom wizard, is best known as the only person who has printed Diane Arbus’s work since her death in 1971. Here, Selkirk shares rare insight into the photographer’s extraordinary breakthroughs: “People recognized pictures they could believe in. Nobody believes in an Ansel Adams picture. Everybody believes in a Diane Arbus picture, for reasons that had been built into the work.” 

Is Photography Yorgos Lanthimos’s True Calling?
A conversation with Zack Hatfield, from Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” in The PhotoBook Review

Yorgos Lanthimos, the filmmaker behind Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness (2024), and most recently, Bugonia (2025), is known for his stylized, pitch-black comedies rife with disfigurement, deadpan dialogue, and transgressive gamesmanship. His experimental spirit undiminished by mainstream success, Lanthimos has recently branched out to a new venture: the photobook. Here, the director discusses his fledgling career as a maker of dreamy, category-defying photobooks. “The beautiful thing about photobooks is that they often allow for a story that’s not tied to the conventions of narrative,” he says.

Zen and the Art of Photography
A conversation with Michael Famighetti, from Aperture No. 261, “The Craft Issue”

Mark Steinmetz and Irina Rozovsky discuss the mysteries of the darkroom and the gifts of close looking. “Picture making is like a strange maze, and there’s a frustration and euphoria to it,” says Steinmetz. “Frustration in not quite knowing if and when a photograph is going to announce itself and then the pure joy when it shouts, ‘Over here!’”

Melina Matsoukas Creates Space for Black Stories in Hollywood and Beyond
A conversation with Solange Knowles, from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

Solange Knowles recently sat down with Melina Matsoukas for the “Barbara Walters treatment,” interviewing her friend and collaborator about her visionary career spanning fashion, photography, music, and film. “I always felt like I had this purpose to do these things and honor my family and the people that empowered me,” says Matsoukas. “I just didn’t know what the tool or medium would be to do that.”

The Lives of Coreen Simpson
A conversation with Deborah Willis, from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (Aperture, 2025)

For five decades, Coreen Simpson has chronicled hip-hop, fashion, and New York’s cultural scene with unparalleled style. Here, in an interview from Simpson’s new monograph, the artist speaks with the art historian Deborah Willis. “The camera gave me license to see the world,” Simpson says. “When I have my camera with me, I’m not afraid of anybody. I always feel like I can just do anything if I have my camera with me.”

Daniel Arnold’s New Pleasure? Missing the Shot. 
A conversation with Freddy Martinez

On the occasion of a new monograph, the street photographer Daniel Arnold speaks about New York City folklore, stepping away from Instagram, and his shifting priorities as an artist. “I made an edit of probably three thousand photos to show the scope of what’s there from my current point of view: Here’s my trajectory from those very crude photographs when I couldn’t use a camera to now trying to work without my brain noticing,” Arnold says.

David Alekhuogie Sees Blackness at the Core of Modern Art
A conversation with Zoë Hopkins, from A Reprise (Aperture, 2025)

In his project A Reprise, David Alekhuogie remixes Walker Evans’s images of African sculptures—and poses bold questions about what we consider fake or original, art or archive. “I wanted to make work from the perspective of an outsider, because I think that to grapple with broken, inherited cultural capital is to always be an outsider,” says Alekhuogie.

Vija Celmins Isn’t Interested in Photography
A conversation with Richard Learoyd, from Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting”

For more than half a century, Vija Celmins has produced absorbing paintings and drawings that are often inspired by—and mistaken for—photographs. Here, she speaks with Richard Learoyd about images, surfaces, and illusion. “My tools are like hours, and it becomes a real part of the work,” Celmins says. “Whereas in photography, it’s instantaneous, and then you pick which image. It’s hard to do either one, it seems to me.”

“Superfine” Unpacks Self-Expression, Resistance, and Status Through Black Style
A conversation with Monique Long

Earlier this year, the exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York explored Black style across three hundred years through the lens of dandyism. Here, Superfine catalog contributors Elizabeth Way, Kimberly Jenkins, and Ekow Eshun consider what it means to be a Black dandy—and how the figure functions in diasporic culture and history.

The Year in Portfolios

Silvia Rosi Reimagines the Family Album
by Vanessa Peterson, from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In her performative self-portraits, Silvia Rosi speaks to experiences of the African diaspora across Europe. “Rather than reaching toward historical personages, Rosi emulates those who aren’t written about, the lives of immigrants trying to establish themselves in a new country in the face of economic precarity and cultural dislocation,” writes Vanessa Peterson. “Her images beautifully highlight tender, painful feelings of misrecognition and alienation, and the difficulties of starting anew.”

A Bittersweet Ode to the Teenagers of 2000s Seoul
by Hiji Nam, from Aperture No. 261, “The Seoul Issue”

In search of lost youth, the New York–raised Sung Jin Park spent his thirties photographing high schoolers in his native Korea. “The series is photographed like an editorial, with the subjects often looking straight at you; we meet their gaze as teenagers ourselves and are transported back to the thrilling desperation of youthful indiscretions and the hope that they’d puncture the seemingly endless expanse of adolescent boredom,” writes Hiji Nam.

David Lynch’s Outsized Influence on Photography

The director David Lynch (1946–2025) blended a dark surrealism with banal Americana to create hypnotic, dreamlike atmospheres. His plots were cryptic; his characters eccentric and unforgettable; his love of coffee, cherry pie, and Transcendental Meditation, legendary. Lynch was an artist of total originality who invented his own cinema of the unconscious, influencing generations of image-makers. Here, a group of photographers—Gregory Crewdson, Roe Ethridge, Todd Hido, Tania Franco Klein, Jarod Lew, Alec Soth, and Yelena Yemchuk—pay homage to the beloved filmmaker. 

Sakir Khader’s Portraits of Palestinian Perseverance
by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” under the column Viewfinder

Sakir Khader’s photographs of people in conflict zones across the Middle East document violence and grief alongside moments of tenderness and reprieve. “Khader doesn’t parachute into war zones. He doesn’t join official military embeds,” writes Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. “Without narrative or polemic, his images create a withering critique of US foreign policy from the so-called War on Terror until today.” 

A Photographer’s Scavenged Still Lifes
by Jesse Dorris, from Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting”

Leaving leftovers in her backyard, Lia Darjes creates a stage for a series of improvised tableaux. Snails, squirrels, ladybugs, and other fauna pay visits to the backyards of Berlin and parts unknown; scavenging the leftovers of human congregation, they trigger Darjes’s camera. “I was sitting in the garden one day,” she says, “just thinking, What’s next? And I saw a squirrel jumping on our garden table. I thought, I wonder if I can recreate that.” 

How Sarker Protick Built a Career Through Listening
by Varun Nayar

In Bangladesh, Sarker Protick combines the impulses of the photojournalist with the intuition of a musician, unpacking questions about photography’s relationship to time and memory. “Musical composition is such an editorial process; you build a logic through it,” Protick says. “That selectiveness is vital, and it came to me naturally as a photographer.” 

A Portrait of Creative Community in Ivory Coast
by Tiana Reid, from from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In his crisp, ecstatic photographs, Nuits Balnéaires draws from iconic West African portraiture to depict his circle of friends and family. A relentless respect for fashion, tailoring, jewelry, craft, and aesthetics are, to Nuits Balnéaires, “a way to really reclaim that identity which is strongly African, but also with a lightness that equals an openness to the world, to this contemporary world, to this global world in which we exist today.” 

Photographing the Night That Shook Seoul
by Jungmin Cho, from Aperture No. 261, “The Seoul Issue”

Last December, South Korea found itself under martial law for the first time since the Gwangju Uprising. Yezoi Hwang took to the streets with her camera. The uniforms of the police blocking the National Assembly and confronting the protesters failed to absorb light, reflecting it instead, turning them into ghosts. In contrast, hopeful handwritten notes, ribbons, and tiny, solidaristic snowmen became fixtures of the cityscape. As Hwang states: “Photography becomes a tool that allows one individual to confront the multitude.”

David Gilbert’s Queer Wish for Other Worlds
by Evan Moffitt

David Gilbert’s colorful studio photographs feel intensely private, like a scrapbook for a tightly knit circle of friends. “The simple stuff that Gilbert photographs isn’t meant to last: drawings and collages on paper that are usually destroyed by the time their image circulates,” writes Evan Moffitt. “Instead, they’re preserved in the paper stock of his photographic prints. In Gilbert’s studio, the lens always comes last, even though it’s the first thing we see.”

Alana Perino Crafts a Haunting Story of Family and Memory
by Eli Cohen, from from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In the Florida island town of Longboat Key, Alana Perino—and winner of the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize—portrays a home upended by loss. As Eli Cohen writes: “Pictures of Birds does not shy away from the idea that spirits dwell in this home, and in many ways, the photographs take comfort in their presence.”

The Year in Essays

How An-My Lê Makes Meaning from History’s Psychic Debris
by Ocean Vuong, from Small Wars (Aperture, 2025)

Ocean Vuong reflects on An-My Lê’s photographs of Vietnam and the US, considering how the artist masterfully uses blurred motion and stillness to reclaim the semiotics of war. As Vuong writes: “The stillness Lê captures is not one of lifelessness—but of life lived so fully—the arrested movement of these figures, as in another shot of a crowd of people observing a solar eclipse, is a reclamation from the semiotics of war and tragedy.”

Richard Misrach on the Eerie Grandeur of Global Trade
by Rebecca Solnit, from Cargo (Aperture, 2025)

Rebecca Solnit considers the photographer’s recent work tracing histories of shipping routes and their impact on the natural environment. “These ships carry specific burdens, but they also transport the burden of the industrial age’s consumption and production and its impacts,” writes Solnit. “They carry a burden, a cargo, of meanings.”

Sally Mann’s Photographs of Girls on the Cusp of Adulthood
by Rebecca Bengal

On the occasion of Aperture’s reissue of the long sought-after volume, the writer Rebecca Bengal looks at At Twelve through a dozen reflections. “The true subject of At Twelve is time itself,” Bengal writes, “perceptions of time and youth, about being a girl, versus a woman, about the chasm between those two phases, and what it means to cross them, and what selves are lost and what selves are inhabited in that process.”

Stephen Shore on the Color Red
From Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” under the column Notebook

The color can evoke love, anger, and—especially for photographers—danger. What makes red so tricky? “A painter can choose the shade of red they want. They can choose not to use the color at all. They can place it where they want on the canvas and in relation to the other colors they have chosen. If a painter were to see a red door and want it to turn black, they would have that option,” Stephen Shore writes. “A photographer wouldn’t. We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us.”

Seydou Keïta’s Revelatory Portraits of Malian Life
by Kobby Ankomah Graham, from Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads”

In midcentury Bamako, sitting for a portrait in Seydou Keïta’s studio was a defining assertion of identity. “Keïta’s images offer windows into a world where individuals claim space within a rapidly shifting society,” writes Kobby Ankomah Graham. “They are living archives, constantly being reinterpreted through contemporary perspectives. They show the enduring power of photography to capture more than mere aesthetic.”

Nikki S. Lee Stays in the Picture
by Hyunji Nam, from Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue” 

Nikki S. Lee was a rising star in New York’s late-’90s art world—then she walked away. Can the artist reinvent herself in Seoul? “I’ve never once dreamed of being a photographer,” Lee stated. “To me, photography was just one medium I happened to use. I never saw it as the end goal.” 

Kunié Sugiura’s Genre-Blending Vision
by Erin O’Toole, from Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting”

Since the late 1960s, Kunié Sugiura has defied the expectations of the art world with hybrid, dreamlike forms that test the limits of photographic expression. Sugiura’s practice, which melds photography and painting, emerged, in part, from the heritage of artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. But while her work bears hallmarks of Moholy-Nagy’s legacy, Sugiura’s approach to photography also reflects her fierce independence of mind and the influence of Japanese aesthetics. “Even before she took up a brush, Kunie Sugiura was gesturing toward painting,” writes Erin O’Toole.

Bruce Weber’s All-American Obsessions
by Natasha Stagg

Bruce Weber’s ad campaigns for Abercrombie & Fitch and Calvin Klein made him one of the most prestigious names in photography—until he was accused by male models of unwanted advances. Will a recent exhibition reshape his legacy? “To see these images now is to recognize them from an earlier, non-art context,” writes Natasha Stagg, “and to recall their impact: a stirring of sexuality, a seed of aspiration.” 

How Baghdad Is Rebuilding Its Arts Community
by Dalia Al-Dujaili, Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads,” under the column Dispatches

After decades of conflict, photographers gather to reimagine Iraq’s global image. As Dalia Al-Dujaili writes: “The wide accessibility of photography, which requires little more than a smartphone, has accelerated its growth in Baghdad. With more photographers emerging, the need for a communal space to share images has become crucial.” 

Essex Hemphill’s Love Knew No Bounds
by Michael Londres

A crucial voice for Black queer desire and liberation, the late poet—finally back in print—has ignited a fire in American artists across generations. This year, a group exhibition in Washington, DC, commemorated the bygone era in which the poet thrived, and celebrated the dream that he kept alive for the next generation. “In a town of memorials set in stone, the show pulsates with optimism and collective life,” writes Michael Londres. 

Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.

Pioneering Voices

David Alekhuogie: A Reprise

In A Reprise, David Alekhuogie remixes Walker Evans’s photographs of African art, provoking timely questions about authorship and authenticity. In 1935, Walker Evans photographed hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alekhuogie investigates Evans’s photographs, provocatively remixing them into vibrant collages, and confronting the legacy of authorship behind Western perceptions of African art. Drawing upon the musical concept of the reprise—a performance of repetition—Alekhuogie stakes a claim to restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours

In her searing, diaristic portrait of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together over a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity—culminating with the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020. Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay. “They know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Collect a limited edition of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours featuring a signed print by the artist and a copy of the volume.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules

Ground Rules in the first bilingual survey by one of Mexico’s most innovative and fearless photographic artists. Celebrated for his photobooks Carpoolers (2014) and A Small Guide to Homeownership (2020), Cartagena is known for his formally engaging and socially incisive images that span the politics of the US-Mexico border, suburban sprawl, and the increasing wealth disparities in North America. Ground Rules emphasizes Cartagena’s serial-based approach and innovative production of artists’ books, and deploys an array of photographic formats, from documentary and collage to the appropriation of vernacular photographs and AI-generated imagery—all unified by a commitment to addressing life in Mexico today with humor and pathos.

Collect a limited edition of Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules featuring two prints by the artist and a signed copy of the volume.

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real

Wish This Was Real is the definitive early-career survey by one of the most acclaimed photographic artists working today. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion—including his iconic covers of Vogue magazine and his photography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition catalog—Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Offering new perspectives by leading writers on his long-standing themes of self-determination and the extraordinary radiance of the everyday, Wish This Was Real shows how photography can be rooted in a collective past while evoking imagined futures.

Collect a limited edition of Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real featuring three metallic cover volumes presented with two posters in custom deluxe folder.

Coreen Simpson: A Monograph

Coreen Simpson—photographer, writer, jeweler—has done it all. Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is a comprehensive survey of a singular, creative force who interweaves photography, design, and explorations of identity. Working for publications such as Essence, Unique New York, and The Village Voice, from the late 1970s onward, Simpson covered New York’s art and fashion scenes, producing portraits of a wide range of Black artists, literary figures, and celebrities. Her iconic jewelry, the Black Cameo, has been worn by everyone from the model Iman to civil-rights leader Rosa Parks. This long-awaited volume, Simpson’s first, features her celebrated B-Boys series—portraits of young people coming of age during the early years of hip-hop—as well as her experiments with collage and other formal interventions. 

Collect a limited-edition print from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter brings critical insights into the mind and eye of Carrie Mae Weems, a touchstone artist renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. The volume traces a spiritual and personal journey through Weems’s career, gathering together her landmark bodies of work from Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) to Preach (2024), her most recent series on the Black church, alongside a series of essays and contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

Words & Pictures

Aperture Magazine Subscription

The source for photography since 1952, Aperture features immersive portfolios, in-depth writing, and must-read interviews with today’s leading artists. Numerous luminaries have guest edited issues—including this year’s “Liberated Threads” issue guest edited by Tanisha C. Ford—among them Wolfgang Tillmans, Tilda Swinton, Alec Soth, Deana Lawson, Sarah Lewis, and Wendy Red Star, making the magazine essential reading for anyone interested in photography and contemporary culture.

The Photography Workshop Book Series

In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. Whether showcasing Vik Muniz on seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways; Graciela Iturbide on how to employ a deeply personal vision while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds; or Dawoud Bey on photographing people and communities, these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Josef Koudelka: Next

Josef Koudelka: Next is an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists. Drawing from extensive interviews conducted over nearly a decade with the artist and his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators from around the globe, author Melissa Harris offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, this visual biography includes personal and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, alongside iconic images from his extensive body of work spanning the 1950s to the present.

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images

Race Stories brings together a collection of award-winning short essays by the late cultural historian Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories features seventy-one essays paired with 189 photographs, examining the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. This volume is the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira

Throughout his decades-long career, Takuma Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). At the Limits of the Gaze collects Nakahira’s writings in English for the first time, bringing together boundary-pushing essays that challenge the expressive limits of photography. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.” 

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, or sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

Children’s & Activity Books

Inspire young readers with three special books that explore the magic of photography. Eyes Open, compiled by Susan Meiselas, is a sourcebook of photography ideas and prompts for children to engage with the world through the camera. Seeing Things serves as a wonderful introduction to photography, with narration by Joel Meyerowitz on how photographers can transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography.

On the Road

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs—A Chronological Album

Well known for his luminous photographs of landscapes and suburban housing, Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all his work. A decade after the book’s first publication, this revised and expanded edition of Intimate Distance charts Hido’s career with ten years of new photographs. From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this collection reveals how Hido’s unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

Justine Kurland: Highway Kind (2021 Edition)

Justine Kurland’s Highway Kind contrasts the fantasy of the American dream with the nation’s reality. In the early 2000s, Kurland and her young son, Casper, traveled in their customized van through the United States. Balancing her life as an artist and mother, Kurland reveals in her photographs her fascinations with the road, the western frontier, escapism, and ways of living outside mainstream values. Casper’s interests—particularly in trains and later cars—and the people he befriends along the way weave throughout Kurland’s images. From images of open vistas and epic landscapes to depictions of out-of-the-way communities and subcultures, Kurland’s work is equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian.

Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders

Danny Lyon’s riveting book about a Chicago motorcycle club is one of the definitive accounts of American counterculture. First published in 1968, The Bikeriders offers an immersive look into the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, bringing together photographs and transcribed interviews by Lyon from 1963 to 1967. The volume was also the inspiration for the 2024 film of the same name starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy. 

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast

In Atlantic Coast, Anastasia Samoylova puts her distinctive mark on the American road trip, adding a new chapter to a storied lineage of photographers. In 1954, American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document the historic US Route 1, already predicting seismic changes to small towns and major cities along the route brought by the rapidly expanding Interstate Highway System. Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along Route 1, Samoylova retraces Abbott’s trip seventy years later, in reverse—beginning in her home state of Florida and ending in Maine. In color and black and white, Samoylova’s photographs explore the enduring impact of Route 1 as a corridor of commerce, migration, and myth, revealing how the American landscape continues to be shaped by infrastructure, ideology, and illusion.

Collect a limited-edition print from Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast.

Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places, The Complete Works

Stephen Shore’s photographs of the American vernacular landscape have influenced not only generations of photographers but the medium at large. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered his unarticulated vision of America via the highway and camera. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, inaugurating what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years. In 1982, Aperture published Shore’s first monograph, the now-legendary Uncommon Places. Since then, this formative work has continued to be expanded on and reissued, including in The Complete Works (2015) and Selected Works, 1973–1981 (2017), which features previously unseen images from the series.

Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed 

In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton offers an insider’s look at the skateboarding community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused community of skateboarding, the book reflects on a subculture in the making and the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create. “This book is a culmination of literally my first idea as a photographer,” Templeton notes, “which was to document this culture that I’m part of.”

Collect a limited edition of Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed featuring a hand-painted print by the artist and slipcase edition of the volume.

Contemporary Classics

Tina Barney: Family Ties

In Family Ties, Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common. In the late 1970s, Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Released upon the occasion of Barney’s first retrospective in Europe, Family Ties brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career.

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz-Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax

From hip-hop to Nefertiti, Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to span the artist’s career. Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reinterprets Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination,” Erizku states. “When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.” Blending Erizku’s studio practice with his work as an editorial photographer, the volume is accompanied by essays from acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Félix, alongside conversations with Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent.

Richard Misrach: Cargo

Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Richard Misrach’s images offer a timely meditation on the profound impact of global trade on the environment. In 2021, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its height, seemed to nearly halt the networks of international trade, Misrach began taking thousands of photographs of cargo ships as they moved to and from the Port of Oakland, California. Cargo presents the acclaimed photographer’s sublime meditation on the often-unseen patterns of global trade and commerce.

Collect a limited-edition print from Richard Misrach: Cargo.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II

In their evocative self-portraits, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

Wendy Red Star: Delegation

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow), centering Native American life and material culture through the artist’s imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Delegation is a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, gleaning from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring.

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society. The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades, alongside a range of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians.

Aperture Legends

Robert Frank: The Americans

In the nearly seven decades since its publication in the 1950s, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream. In 2024, to mark the centennial of Frank’s birth, Aperture reissued The Americans, alongside a special centennial edition with a slipcase and featuring a booklet showcasing Frank’s early films.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. First published by Aperture in 1986, The Ballad continues to exert a major influence on photography and other aesthetic realms, its status as a contemporary classic firmly established.

An-My Lê: Small Wars

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. First published by Aperture in 2005, this twentieth anniversary reissue brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, Small Wars, and 29 Palms—alongside a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later. Taken together, this trilogy presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war.

Sally Mann: At Twelve

First published by Aperture in 1988, Sally Mann’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is an intimate exploration of the complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann made portraits that capture the excitement and social possibilities of a tender age—while not shying away from alluding to experiences of abuse, poverty, or young pregnancy—and the girls in her photographs return the camera’s gaze with equanimity. “The true subject of At Twelve is time itself,” writes Rebecca Bengal, “perceptions of time and youth, about being a girl, versus a woman, about the chasm between those two phases, and what it means to cross them, and what selves are lost and what selves are inhabited in that process.” This reissue of At Twelve features new scans and separations from Mann’s 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a quality true to the original edition. 

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In Nicaragua, Meiselas forms an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize her photographs and relate them to history as it unfolded. In this new edition, thirty images are linked via QR codes to excerpts from films by the artist in which she interviews and collaborates with the people she photographed and local communities. By extending and deepening her work, Meiselas asks us “to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book, but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”

Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition

Sixty years after its publication, Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition continues to offer unmatched insight into the mind, life, and work of a twentieth-century icon. Originally issued as a hardcover volume in 1965, The Flame of Recognition holds the distinction of being the very first title in Aperture’s publishing history. The volume was reissued in 2015 on its fiftieth anniversary, and ten years later in this new paperback edition. The volume brings together a selection of Weston’s iconic images—from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still lifes—alongside excerpts of his writing from his now-famed Daybooks and letters, channeling the photographer’s creativity and, in his own words, “present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty . . . without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique.” Additional contributions to the book include two of Weston’s sons, Brett and Cole, and other Aperture cofounders, Dody Weston Thompson and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist.

Exclusive Editions

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, Limited Edition

One of the most compelling photographers working today, Deana Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful through her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the first photobook by the visionary artist, and this limited edition features a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print on the cover. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in her essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Diana Markosian: Father, Limited Edition Book and Print Set

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together a mix of documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera, Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father. The volume is a follow-up to Markosian’s first book, Santa Barbara, in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement.

David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis

With his mesmerizing analog photograms, David Benjamin Sherry melds queer history, abstraction, and darkroom magic. Born out of what Sherry has called the “transformative potential of the darkroom,” each of his large-scale, cameraless color photograms is laboriously made by hand. Using cardboard masks to create geometric forms and incorporating his own body into the images, Sherry actively references histories of photography—while also thinking through the intersections of identity, form, and the hypnotic power of extreme color. Pink Genesis collects twenty-nine one-of-a-kind works that delight in the pleasures of form and color.

Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale now for savings on photobooks, magazines, and limited-edition prints.

Mnemosyne Atlas

One of my all-time favorite artworks. Conceived by Aby Warburg in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death five years later, the Mnemosyne Atlas is a giant compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other images from across Western visual culture categorized and mounted on sixty-three panels, through which Warburg attempted to map the “afterlife of antiquity.” His project strikes me as something like an early internet search produced by one idiosyncratic mind. Warburg tries to be objective and comprehensive (the Atlas contains nearly a thousand images), and yet his work includes an enormous amount of personal decision making and subjective, enduring beauty.

Encyclopedia Britannica

The most kitsch object of all! The idea that you could distill all human knowledge into a single set of books, from A to Z, is just preposterous, filled with hubris and Enlightenment-era optimism. I like looking back at these physical objects (the Encyclopaedia Britannica went online only after the 2010 edition) to see what they communicated about the world. If kitsch is a way of distilling the messiness of life into an easily digestible set of images and ideas, then an encyclopedia is its quintessential text.

Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant’s 2011 book Cruel Optimism—a meditation on the condition in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”—is one I return to over and over again. I first encountered it while making a video work about the rose gold iPhone, thinking about how we get attached to objects we already ostensibly own.

Algorithms of Oppression

Safiya Noble’s 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a kind of modern companion to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. I often think about the difficulties in making an objective archive or representation of “cultural memory,” as Warburg was trying to do, and how these ideas have been accelerated within the giant archive that is the internet. Noble’s book explores the politics of search engines such as Google, and the seemingly neutral technologies that are always inflected with human bias.

Figure Skating

I became obsessed with figure skating in 1994 when an assailant, hired by Tonya Harding’s husband and her bodyguard, bashed Nancy Kerrigan in the knee. That year, more people watched the Olympic women’s skating final than the Super Bowl. I was a competitive figure skater from the age of nine to seventeen. Skating is the perfect mix of physical rigor, showmanship, and kitsch. And the rink was the first place I began to process some of the abiding themes in my work—how people are made (and make themselves) into images, how women’s bodies become commodities, how people are used up in our culture for entertainment and profit.

F for Fake

Worth watching if only for the baby monkey! A late work by Orson Welles, the 1973 film F for Fake documents a famous forger of Picasso and Matisse paintings before moving on to examine other types of fraud and illusion. Ever relevant in our time of online grifters and algorithmic legerdemain, it is also beautifully shot, funny, and very entertaining.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” under the column Curriculum.

Youth is about a moment, a memory—a state of becoming. It’s the spark of firsts: the first glance, the first protest, the first kiss, the first fall, the first revelation. This collection gathers over one hundred images chosen by the photographers or their estates, exploring the many faces of youth across generations and geographies. This selection reminds us of our own beginnings, encapsulating how youth is not only an era in our lives but a state of mind.

Through October 26, collect signed or estate-stamped, museum-quality 6-by-6-inch prints, starting at $110. When you purchase through this link, you directly benefit the artists and support the full range of Aperture’s nonprofit publishing and educational programming in New York and worldwide. Below are highlights from Youth.

Abbas

“As a boy I had a heroic image of the journalist: you traveled, you went to war, you covered historical events. I started out both writing and taking photographs, but I soon found it was more fun taking pictures.” —From Magnum Stories (Phaidon, 2004)

Arielle Bobb-Willis

“This image was taken on a cloudy New Orleans afternoon in 2017. The Lower Garden District near Tchoupitoulas Street . . . lots of textured buildings and quiet streets . . . good for creating. Being inspired by painters like Kandinsky, Jacob Lawrence, and Sister Gertrude Morgan, I really see my subjects as colors on a canvas . . . a little green there, some orange. . . . I find it interesting to bring the ideals of creating compositions with paint into the photographic world . . . it expands our ideas on what a portrait can be and it allows for true abstractions to live within our reality.”

Kwame Brathwaite

“This image captures a young child in front of an A-frame advertisement for a James Brown concert at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem. The sign towers over the curious child as he takes in the moment. The contrast between the toddler’s wide-eyed gaze and the confident pose of Brown captures both the innocence of the child and the aspiration of Brown.

In the face of the grandeur of the Apollo and all that it represents, the child is in awe of the moment, ripe with possibility, inspiration and hope.” —The Kwame Brathwaite Archive

Danny Clinch

“This was my very first portrait session with Bruce Springsteen. He was rehearsing with the E Street Band at Fort Monmouth and had recently gotten the band back together after over a decade of music without the E Street Band. He invited me out to photograph for the upcoming tour after I sent him a copy of Discovery Inn, my first and recent book of photographs at the time. Having grown up in NJ listening to Springsteen, I do recall having tears in my eyes as I was driving out to the shoot that day listening to Greetings from Asbury Park.”

Ernest Cole

“The fellow pictured appears to be channeling local heroes like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, but the song that comes to my mind is John Lee Hooker’s ‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James.’ It’s typical that Cole should discover a youthful ‘street’ version of the mythical Stagger Lee. More than 70 years after ‘Stack’ killed Billy. Nearly 50 years after the song was first recorded. Twelve years after Lloyd Price’s hit single, as William Faulkner noted: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’” —James Sanders, the Ernest Cole Family Trust

Baldwin Lee

“A contrast is suggested by the comparison of the young man’s new baseball glove and the ripped bag of trash. The pants hanging from the delicate clothesline offer the possibility of other boys who live in the household.”

Danny Lyon

“All the pictures in Uptown were made on a single block, Clifton Street. Lyon would ride there on his Triumph. Many years had passed when an Uptown teen, Rita Knight, sent Danny an email: ‘I have displayed your picture in my home and I get lots of comments and love to tell the story of the hippie that came over on his scooter, that gave us a dollar to pose for pictures. Take care, I love those pictures. It was a sad time in America, but some of us made it out . . . I am still married to the same boy I was with when you were there. I plan to be cremated and then some friends will sneak over and put some of my ashes on Wilson and Magnolia, and then some out at the lake where we spent so many happy days.’”

Diana Markosian

“As a former dancer, stepping back into ballet through photography has allowed me to reconnect with my own childhood, not just in memory, but by immersing myself in a world that once felt so familiar—from the quiet rituals of helping one another prepare to the music and movement on stage.”

Joel Meyerowitz

“As a father I watched my daughter Ariel from the moment she was born at the most intimate distance, and every small change marked a turning point; from newborn to infant to toddler, and continued on up through today when she’s now in her fifties. And though the journey has been wondrous at every stage, it was at puberty that the move into adolescence was most remarkable. For a man to watch his daughter slip—seemingly overnight—from childhood into becoming a young woman is as close to miraculous as any of life’s changes can be.”

Adam Pape

“The streets of New York are defined by the energy of its citizens, constantly testing the boundaries of expression and freedom. Moving through the city there is always a sense that one is on display, for eyes or lenses on the street. In 2017, I became captivated by roses surrounding a police station in my neighborhood. As I photographed the roses next to the officers, I may have seemed like a flower enthusiast to an onlooker. However, in the frame, the blooms became a soft red veil over the city. I then noticed other roses planted in the urban surroundings and imagined them as links between disparate locations and neighborhoods. These flowers have continued to be my guide through the city, acting as an alternative map to its diverse landscape.”

Shikeith

“My photograph Oche (With Candle) delves into the spiritual and emotional interiority of Black men, examining how the body holds memory, grief, and the possibility of spiritual elevation, all rendered through a deliberate blue tonality. As part of my series Notes Towards Becoming a Spill, this work reflects on the fluidity of identity, where Blackness, masculinity, and yearning are not fixed states but porous, ever-shifting forms. The candle functions both as a vessel and an emblem, conjuring ritual, remembrance, and illumination, while also embodying the delicate interplay between vulnerability and strength. By placing Oche in a soft, dimly lit, almost uterine environment, I aim to craft a sanctuary in which Black men are not confined to rigid definitions but allowed to remain malleable, free to soften, to feel, to yield. This image, like the series it belongs to, gestures toward the shedding of armor and an embrace of the sacred emotional fullness of becoming.”

Anastasia Samoylova

“I photographed this flag as it seemed to both announce itself and conceal the life behind it—a reminder of how symbols shape our sense of home and belonging. The photograph is part of my Atlantic Coast project, published by Aperture, in which I retraced Berenice Abbott’s path along Route 1, reflecting on how the American landscape continues to carry its myths and contradictions. In its layered view, House Flag also echoes the tensions explored by Robert Frank in The Americans, while reimagining them in today’s landscape.”

Carmen Winant

 “‘Have you cut off your hands yet?,’ writes Marge Piercy in her 1982 poem ‘The Friend.’ Across the three sparse stanzas, Piercy renders a destructive, perhaps violent, romantic relationship in which the woman is pushed to negate herself. I thought about this poem while making this work by hand: cutting each individual image (from a single book on healing touch), mixing batches of dye, and bathing each picture. My hands are a surrogate for myself. They are the tool by which I make things in the world: in the studio, and in myself.”

Zanele Muholi

“This photograph is of me as a six-year-old at home in Umlazi township, Durban. In this photograph, I am standing in front of a banana tree at the back of my home. I vividly remember my mother coming home from her work as a domestic worker. Often, she would bring back apples from her employer, and I can still see her cutting them into four slices for us to share, such a simple joy that meant so much. My childhood was marked by these moments: the fresh taste of apples and bananas, and the roasted stuffed chicken my mother’s white employers discarded, but she lovingly brought home.”

The Magnum Square Sale in Partnership with Aperture, Youth, is available through October 26, 2025.

Don McCullin – New York

A Desecrated Serenity charts seven decades of Don McCullin’s photojournalistic work across conflicts in Greece, Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, and Beirut. The exhibition, his first New York show at Hauser and Wirth, presents his harrowing portraits and reportage from the front lines alongside cherished objects—like the Nikon F camera that once caught a stray bullet during battle. The exhibition moves from the stark landscapes of crime and poverty in postwar Britain; through unflinching records of global conflict; to images of vibrant cultural rituals in India, Indonesia, and the Sudan; to painterly meditations on the countrysides of France, Scotland, and Somerset, where McCullin sought solace late in his career.

Don McCullin: A Desecrated Serenity at Hauser & Wirth, through November 8, 2025.

Tyler Mitchell – Paris

Growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell made skateboarding videos inspired by Spike Jonze and Ryan McGinley. After enrolling at New York University with plans to become a filmmaker, he began to make portraits full of energy, brash color, and sartorial panache, honing a signature look that landed him commissions for i-D and Vogue. This fall, Mitchell’s exhibition Wish This Was Real arrives in Paris after stops in Berlin, Helsinki, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Covering roughly a decade of image making, the show offers new perspectives on his abiding themes of masculinity, joy, and beauty. As the critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an accompanying monograph published by Aperture, “Mitchell’s work brilliantly reconceptualizes familiar spaces and teaches us that Black utopia has always been a place, constantly moving, unfolding, and being remade—like freedom.”

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, October 15, 2025–January 25, 2026

Katy Grannan – San Francisco

California’s Humboldt County is considered a place where people go to disappear. Katy Grannan first came to this bucolic backcountry in 2023 and began making portraits of people she found through Craigslist ads, flyers, and eventually word of mouth. Known for building long-term relationships with her subjects, Grannan conspired with those she photographed to create a kind of collaborative fiction, working both in the studio and in nature to thread together connections between site and self. Mad River unites these portraits for the first time, offering an intimate glimpse of the independent spirit of Humboldt County’s inhabitants.

Katy Grannan: Mad River at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, through October 25, 2025.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging – New York

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography program of annual exhibitions that have, over the decades, brought then-emerging artists, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Lieko Shiga, to wider renown. MoMA’s latest edition considers themes of belonging as explored by a baker’s dozen of artists and collectives—hailing from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City—who weave personal stories with broader colonial histories. Gabrielle Goliath and Prasiit Sthapit are among the photographers, along with Sandra Blow—whose whose tender portraits of friends in Mexico City’s queer underground attest to photography’s community-making potential.

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 14, 2025–January 17, 2026

Samuel Fosso – New York

“I wanted to show how good I look,” Samuel Fosso once said of 70s Lifestyle (1975–78), a series he began as a teenager. Autoportrait, Fosso’s first solo exhibition in New York in two decades, certainly succeeds in this goal. The show celebrates the Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer’s self-portraiture, which calls upon and reinvents traditions of studio photography from West Africa and the African diaspora. In addition to 70s Lifestyle, which fuses the visual language of highlife culture with the bold attitude of young Black Americans as seen in magazines of the era, African Spirits (2008) features Fosso adopting the personae of such revolutionaries as Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait at Yossi Milo, New York, through November 8, 2025.

Man Ray – New York

“I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself,” declared a young American in Paris upon his invention of what he named, after himself, the “rayograph.” In 1921, Man Ray had discovered that, by placing everyday objects—such as scissors, keys, a wishbone, and a mousetrap—on photosensitive paper and exposing it to light, a new kind of photography was possible, one that dispensed with the camera entirely in its spectral, chance mash-ups, which quickly became the toast of Dadaist Paris. When Objects Dream includes some sixty rayographs, illuminating how the artist’s “crimes against chemistry and photography” (as he winkingly described them) informed the rest of his rebellious experimentation, which spans painting, cinema, drawing, and photography.

Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 14 through February 1, 2026.

Black Photojournalism – Pittsburgh

At its height in the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Courier was read by hundreds of thousands of readers across the United States, one among many Black newspapers to report on the burgeoning civil rights movement and the struggles for equality and social justice. Newspapers such as the Courier, Atlanta Daily World, and The Chicago Defender take center stage in Black Photojournalism, an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art focused on Black photographers who, from the post–World War II era through the 1980s, helped create the first draft of history. One searing image by Ming Smith, made in 1976, the year of the US bicentennial, points up the aspirations of the American Dream and its limitations: A man gazes outward in reflective sunglasses while the stripes of three flags appear like prison bars.

Black Photojournalism at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, September 13, 2025–January 19, 2026

Cecil Beaton – London

Renowned photographer, illustrator, costume designer, diarist, arriviste, and court photographer to the British royal family, Cecil Beaton is synonymous with glamour. Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World explores his groundbreaking society portraits, tracing an illustrious career from the Jazz Age of “Bright Young Things” to the glitterati of My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958). The show’s trove of photographs, costumes, and ephemera places the viewer into the mind’s eye of the acclaimed “King of Vogue,” whose stylized, highly theatrical portraits of a bygone beau monde once offered starry escapism during the interwar and early postwar era.  As Beaton once said, “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

Cecil Beaton: Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 9 through January 11, 2026.

Ben Shahn – New York

The painter Ben Shahn spent his career chronicling and confronting the social issues of his era—from censorship and authoritarianism to the labor movement and civil rights. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity marks the first US retrospective of the artist’s work in nearly half a century, showcasing the enduring relevance of Shahn’s vision. A highlight includes a selection of photographs—both those taken by Shahn himself and by peers, such as those who worked for the Farm Security Administration—that served as his muse. “One of the main goals of this exhibition is to illuminate the under-appreciated complexity of his aesthetic, the multifaceted layered quality of his work, which is largely indebted to photography, both his own photographs and those of others,” notes curator and art historian Laura Katzman. “Photography was central to Shahn’s vision and his working process.”

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity at The Jewish Museum, New York, through October 26, 2025.

Seydou Keïta – New York

Seydou Keïta captured the dignity and the dreams of the people who posed in his studio in midcentury Bamako, during Mali’s turn to independence. With his ingenious use of props and backdrops, the photographer struck an elegant balance between formality and intimacy, timelessness and urgency. As Kobby Ankomah Graham writes in Aperture’s Summer 2025 cover story, “Keïta’s subjects gaze directly into the camera and claim their place in history on their own terms.” A retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum celebrates Keïta’s own rightful place in history—as an all-time great whose name should be as well-known as that of August Sander, Irving Penn, or Richard Avedon.

Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 10 through March 8, 2026.

Germaine Krull – Germany

Germaine Krull, the legendary modernist photographer, had many nicknames. One anarchist friend dubbed her the “Iron Valkyrie” for her interest in industrial forms, as seen in Métal (1928), a slight but epochal photobook whose tightly cropped, strange-making photographs of the Eiffel Tower and other steel structures launched her career in interwar Paris. She called herself chien fou—crazy dog—and this is the title of an exhibition opening at Museum Folkwang, the home of her estate since 1995. The show examines how Krull balanced her experimental vision with her role as a working photojournalist, drawing overdue attention to an oeuvre that spans reportage, writing, portraiture, and avant-garde photomontage across four continents.

Germaine Krull: Chien Fou at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, November 28, 2025–March 15, 2026

By slowing down to focus on the details, Edeani creates an image dense with meaning. “The woman braiding her hair has tribal marks, which I know from Nigeria,” Edeani says. “Here are these two Black women with completely different complexions and backgrounds. You’ve got the tribal marks, you’ve got the tattoo, the chain, the hoodie. For me, widening the frame made the image much stronger, much more of a story.” 

Born in Nigeria before moving to the United States at the age of sixteen, Edeani is a self-taught photographer who initially trained as an architect. Even so, he always knew he wanted to be an artist. At a young age, he dabbled in drawing and still life painting, and realized how easy it was for him to reproduce things he saw in the world. “I would draw and paint all the time,” he shares. “But in Nigeria, the only kind of career options that are visible to you, at least as a kid, are doctor, engineer, or lawyer. I wasn’t interested in science and I knew I wasn’t going to be a doctor.” 

Architecture was a happy medium between creative expression and the safety of a stable career. After practicing in the field for a few years, he soon realized that he didn’t want to build anything, but he was interested in design. 

Watch Now: Ike Edeani on Style as a Form of Liberation

The photographer reflects on photographing in the city, what drives his work, and documenting everyday Black style.

What better place to see design than through Black style on the streets of New York? As proof of life in the city, the street has excited the brushstrokes and lenses of a wide range of artists and photographers, from the gritty paintings of John Sloan in the early twentieth century to photographers like Roy DeCarava, Jamel Shabazz, and Bill Cunningham. Edeani extends this legacy by turning his cinematic flair toward the brilliance of the everyday. Black vernacular style—the kind of vibrant personal style that takes place far outside an extractive fashion system driven by labels, trends, and fashion seasons—has a mind of its own.  

Church Sunday. Harlem. Little girls dressed in stockings and barrettes. Mothers, grandmothers, and aunties in hats, head wraps, and pencil skirts. “I don’t think I could have done this project justice without including Sunday style,” Edeani says. “Sundays were when we got dressed up. Sunday was the day you show out because that’s when you go to church, which means you’re seeing everybody. That’s the Met Gala.”

At the heart of Edeani’s work is an insistence on glimpses, gestures, and fleeting encounters, rather than posed portraits. Call it the intimacy of the moment. When we pose, we pose the way we always pose. We become hyper aware of the camera, of the photographer, and of our own awkward selves. The juice of Black personal style, for Edeani, lies in the zhuzh—a moment of expression that comes when we add our own twist, our own five-six-seven-eight set to the look, particularly for folks who work jobs that require them to wear a uniform every day. “Black folks do that better than anybody,” Edeani says, “Because we’re denied access, so you make your own shit. And I think that’s so beautiful.” 

For Black folks, who exist within the frame of what the poet Dionne Brand calls “virtuosity or despair,” style is never about vanity. It’s always about creativity, personal expression, and small—even if the smallest—gestures of refusal. The way Edeani sees it, whether we’re going to church or just going about our day, “Black folks want to look good in front of other Black folks. What I really love about Black style is the idea that this is what people choose to put on before they leave the house—this is their best foot forward. And that, to me, is amazing.”

Ike Edeani’s photographs were created using FUJIFILM GFX100RF.

All photographs by Ike Edeani, New York, May–June, 2025

American Photography — Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum may have come late to acquiring photography, but in three decades it has amassed a collection of more than two hundred thousand photographs, a fraction of which is on view as part of American Photography, the first comprehensive survey of its kind in Europe. Spanning three centuries, the show corrals marquee names (Sally Mann, Irving Penn, James Van Der Zee) alongside amateur and commercial obscurities in a sprawling visualization, and vivisection, of the American dream. As we know from the Swiss-born Robert Frank, whose epochal The Americans is included in the exhibition, sometimes it takes an outsider to see the place clearly.

American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, through June 9, 2025

Lucia Moholy — Winterthur, Switzerland

The Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, but its ideas transformed modern society—in no small part due to Lucia Moholy, whose legacy was long eclipsed by that of her male peers. As the Bauhaus’s house photographer, Moholy helped define the visual identity of the design school, immortalizing its architecture, objects, and circle in photographs that distill their subjects’ quintessence. She also played a key role in perfecting the photogram technique often solely credited to her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, and, in 1939, published one of the first histories of photography in English. As this current retrospective makes clear, any history of the medium today would be utterly incomplete without her.

Exposures: Lucia Moholy at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, through July 13, 2025

Annegret Soltau — Frankfurt am Main

For more than six decades, the German artist Annegret Soltau has sought to exceed the strictures of the self through the visceral manipulation of images. Her hallmark is the use of black thread; she stitches representations of her own body and that of other women into photo collages that delve into themes of mother- hood, pregnancy, and aging. Soltau, a product of the feminist movement, is now having her first retrospective—an opportunity for audiences to encounter remarkable multimedia work by an artist decidedly unbound by aesthetic and social conventions.

Uncensored: Annegret Soltau–A Retrospective at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, through August 17, 2025

Wolfgang Tillmans — Paris

The name Wolfgang Tillmans more readily evokes nightclubs and daylong raves of the sort he chronicled in the 1990s than the hushed environs of a library. But this summer, the German photographer is taking over the bibliothèque of the Centre Pompidou, which will go dark in September for a five-year renovation. Given carte blanche, the artist will bring together photographs, videos, music, text, and archival material to transform the mostly empty, sixty-five-thousand-square-foot Public Information Library into a node of epistemological inquiry and Tillmansesque togetherness.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 13–September 22, 2025

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Kunié Sugiura — San Francisco

Since the 1960s, Kunié Sugiura’s genre-blending practice has defied the boundaries of photographic expression. Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art spans the arc of Sugiura’s career across six decades, and marks the first major survey of the artist’s work in the US. Employing a range of experimental techniques—prints made on canvas, photograms, compositions from X-ray negatives, and so on—Sugiura melds these mediums together to create artworks that, as she has said, “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.”

Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through September 14, 2025

Carrie Mae Weems — Turin

In Turin, the Gallerie d’Italia, Intesa Sanpaolo, presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Meister, Aperture’s executive director, and featuring Weems’s landmark bodies of work, such as Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006–ongoing). In her newest work, Preach (2024), a series commissioned specifically for the exhibition, Weems considers religion and spirituality among Black Americans across generations. The exhibition orients Weems’s oeuvre around explorations of her own subjectivity as a way of discovering herself as “a muse and a guide into the unknown,” using her own photographic selfhood to show the intertwined historical, personal, spiritual, and institutional dimensions of otherness that her work unsparingly represents.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at the Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, through September 7, 2025

Stan Douglas — New York

Stan Douglas produces painstakingly composed “speculative histories” that trouble the boundaries between history, fiction, and myth, using the supposed objectivity of the camera as a starting point. Ghostlight, his first United States retrospective in over twenty years, will draw out themes of collective memory and rupture in works that include a new multichannel video installation reimagining D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation. As Douglas once said, “Maybe by breaking the rules of realism in photography—the rules of this automatic, perspectival image—we can get back to a trace of the humanity of looking.”

Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, June 21–November 20, 2025

Marta Astfalck-Vietz — Berlin

Marta Astfalck-Vietz’s contributions to photography’s story may not be as familiar as that of her peers working in Germany in the vital, if imperiled, cultural scene of the 1920s. One reason is that Astfalck-Vietz’s archive was partially destroyed during the bombing of Berlin in World War II. What survived—and have recently been restored—are dreamy, surreal pictures, often embracing formal experimentation, ranging from portraits, to nudes, to performative self-portraits that foreshadow modes of art-making that would become dominant in the 1970s.

Marta Astfalck-Vietz: Staging the Self at the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, July 11–November 30, 2025

Tina Barney: Family Ties (2024)

In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class to which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to her large-format photographs.

In 2024, Aperture published Family Ties, which collects sixty large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney’s career. These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie—a landscape of hidden tension found in microexpressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours (2023)

In her searing, diaristic account of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together more than a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity through to the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020.

Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay. “They know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours.

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson worked with Weston as his partner and model, collaborating on some of his most iconic images. 

Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locations in the western United States where the earlier couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. In chasing Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, finding a new kinship with the collaborative duo as she navigates a cultural landscape that has changed, yet remains mired in the same mythologies about nature, the artist, desire, and inspiration. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.

Collect a limited-edition print from Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis.

An-My Lê: Small Wars (2025)

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and evacuated with her family from Vietnam to the United States in 1975. With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work.

First published by Aperture in 2005 and now reissued on its twentieth anniversary, Small Wars brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, where Lê reconciles the memories of her childhood with the contemporary landscape; Small Wars, which explores a community of Vietnam War reenactors; and 29 Palms, which documents marines training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan—alongside a new afterward by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate two decades later.

Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. “What are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture? How does it become enmeshed with romance and myth over time?” Lê asks in an interview from the book with Hilton Als. “My concern is to make photographs that are provocative in response to the reality of war while challenging its context.”

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (2024)

I’m So Happy You Are Here is a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society.

The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades. Alongside the more than five-hundred images in the book is an illustrated bibliography and a selection of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians—many of which have been translated in English for the first time. While I’m So Happy You Are Here does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, the book offers a deep dive into the significant contributions of women to the history of Japanese photography.

Collect a range of prints from artists featured in I’m So Happy You Are Here.

Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions (2024)

Pao Houa Her’s first monograph presents a deeply personal exploration of the fundamental concepts of home and belonging. A recipient of the 2023–24 Next Step Award, Her creates compelling and personal narratives grounded in the traditions and contemporary metaphors of the Hmong diasporic community. Throughout her images, the artist draws from myriad sources: apocryphal family lore, portraits of herself and her community, and reimagined landscapes in Minnesota and Northern California that stand in for Laos.

My grandfather turned into a tiger brings together four of the artist’s major series, reflecting her keen perspective on the boundary between authenticity and imitation. As Her has stated, photography is “a truth if you want it to be a truth.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions.

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her idyllic images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Made between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.

Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce. They hunt and explore, braid one another’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes. Kurland imagines a world at once lawless and utopian—an Eden in the wild. “I wanted to make the communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls,” writes Kurland. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures.

Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women (2025)

First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve is an intimate yet unflinching portrayal of the interior complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann creates a collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, from the trying times of that age to its excitement and social possibilities.

This long sought-after reissue by one of photography’s most renowned artists retains the spirit of the original, highlighting both Mann’s large-format photographs alongside a series of her writings. As Ann Beattie wrote in 1988 for the book’s introduction: “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” Mann’s portraits do not shy away from the real consequences of this misunderstanding, documenting experiences of destitution, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy, and the girls in her photographs return the viewer’s gaze with equanimity.

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua (2025)

Susan Meiselas first traveled to Nicaragua in June 1978. Three years prior, she had joined Magnum Photos, and this trip marked her first experience working in conflict photography. She went on to spend just over a year in Nicaragua, documenting an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize and extend her photographs, using QR codes in this new edition to link to excerpts from films by the artist. “I’m asking the reader to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book,” says Meiselas in an interview from the volume with Kristen Lubben, “but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”

Diana Markosian: Father (2024)

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera, Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father.

The volume is a follow-up to her first book, Santa Barbara (2020), in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. In Father, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?” 

Collect a limited-edition, signed print-and-book set of Diana Markosian: Father.

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (2023)

Kristine Potter’s dark and brooding photographs reflect on the Southern Gothic landscape of the American South as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the American murder ballad (which has developed a cult appeal and continues to be rerecorded today), the riverscape frequently doubles as a crime scene. Places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond are haunted by both the victor and the violence in the world Potter conjures.

The artist’s seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs—capturing the landscape and creating evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of these stories. The resulting volume, Dark Waters, reflects the casual popular glamorization of violence against women that remains prevalent in today’s cultural landscape. As Potter notes, “I see a through line of violent exhibitionism from those early murder ballads, to the Wild West shows, to the contemporary landscape of cinema and television. Culturally, we seem to require it.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Kristine Potter: Dark Waters.

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Collect the limited-edition print Dakar Roadside with Figures (1972) from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph.

Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022)

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star, who was recently awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations.

In 2022, Aperture published Red Star’s first major monograph, Delegation, a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, which gleans from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. “I’m also marking on history,” says Red Star in an interview from the volume. “And red—I always think about school and failing papers and getting that red mark on your paper. I wanted that red mark on history.”

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (2025)

Carrie Mae Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. Releasing this April alongside a related exhibition with Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, The Heart of the Matter is a comprehensive monograph that gathers together Weems’s landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82) to her most recent series on the Black church.

Throughout the book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the influential artist’s mind and eye. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems—as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys—at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

See here to browse the full collection of featured titles.

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, by Maurice Berger (2024)

In Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, the late cultural historian Maurice Berger explores the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Between 2012 and 2019, Berger first shared these essays in a monthly column on the New York Times Lens blog. Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times, this volume marks the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series, created and coedited by Drs. Sarah E. Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, which reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

Edited by Marvin Heiferman, this anthology brings together seventy-one essays that examine the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race, and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. From pivotal moments in American history to the ways in which images by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gordon Parks, Jamel Shabazz, Pete Souza help us see the world anew, Race Stories showcases Berger’s lifelong endeavor to distill complex ideas about racial equity. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in the book’s foreword: “This collection establishes not only Maurice Berger’s place in the history of the criticism of photography but also his role as a social philosopher determined to underscore, essay by essay, all that unites us as human beings.”

Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023)

In Elegy, Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, this volume marks a continuation of Bey’s ongoing work exploring African American history. Copublished by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Elegy focuses on three of Bey’s landscape series—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—shedding a light on the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the US.

Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey not only evokes history but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. “This is ancestor work,” Bey tells the New York Times. “Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019)

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color.

Brathwaite, who passed away in 2023, was born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance. Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling troupe for Black women. Working with these two organizations, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the Black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph of his work, showcasing Brathwaite’s riveting message about Black culture and freedom. “To ‘Think Black’ meant not only being politically conscious and concerned with issues facing the Black community,” writes Tanisha C. Ford, “but also reflecting that awareness of self through dress and self-presentation. . . . [They] were the woke set of their generation.”

Ernest Cole: The True America (2024)

After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book House of Bondage in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed the city’s streets extensively, chronicling daily life in Harlem and around Manhattan. In 1968 he traveled across the country to cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, as well as to rural areas of the South, capturing the activism and emotional tenor in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s sharp eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.

Cole released very few images from this body of work while he was alive. Thought to be lost entirely, the negatives of Cole’s American pictures resurfaced in Sweden in 2017 and were returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. The True America marks the first time these photographs have been brought together in a major publication. This trove of rediscovered work acts as a vital window into American society and redefines the scope of Cole’s photographic work.

Collect a limited-edition print from Ernest Cole: The True America. An exhibition of The True America is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through June 22, 2025.

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax (2023)

Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. The 2023 volume Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to trace the artist’s career. Spanning over ten years, the monograph blends together his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer, including his conceptual portraits of cultural icons such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan.

Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black people in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “I always think about my work as a constellation, and a new piece is just another star within the universe,” he asserts in his wide-ranging conversation with the curator Antwaun Sargent, included in the book. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination. When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.”

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2021)

In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Montague founded the Wedge Collection in Toronto in an effort to acquire and exhibit work by artists of African descent. As We Rise features over one hundred works from the collection, bringing together artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa in a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Jamel Shabazz’s definitive street portraits to Lebohang Kganye’s blurring of self, mother, and family history in South Africa, As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, “Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration—no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood—but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.”

Collect a special vinyl LP, As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic, featuring a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the diaspora.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Published in 2018, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph was the first book by the acclaimed artist. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Most recently, Lawson was the guest editor of Aperture’s Fall 2024 issue, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” in which she curated a selection of artists past and present to explore the enigmatic nature of photography.

One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in an essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024)

The South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTQIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024) is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

In their evocative self-portraits, Muholi explores and expands upon notions of Blackness, and the myriad possibilities of the self. Drawing on different materials or found objects referencing their environment, a specific event, or lived experience, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states in an interview from the 2018 volume. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z (2024)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to his studio practice and portraiture. Through collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, Sepuya encourages multivalent narrative readings of each image.

Four years after publishing the first widely available volume of Sepuya’s work, Aperture released Dark Room A–Z, a comprehensive monograph that dives into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that he has interwoven throughout the images. The volume unpacks Sepuya’s Dark Room series (2016–21), reflecting on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind this expansive body of work. Alongside Sepuya’s work is a range of writings by critics, curators, friends, and the artist. Dark Room A–Z serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuya’s image-making, after nearly two decades of practice.

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (2022)

A visceral and haunting exploration of Black male vulnerability, joy, and spirituality, Notes towards Becoming a Spill is the first monograph by the acclaimed multimedia artist Shikeith. Following the lyrical artistic expressions of contemporary portraitists such as Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mickalene Thomas, Shikeith photographs men as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.

In work he describes as “leaning into the uncanny,” the faces and bodies of Shikeith’s collaborators glisten with sweat (and tears) in a manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what the critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” Notes towards Becoming a Spill redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

Collect a limited-edition screenprint by Shikeith.

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Gregory Crewdson

I had just begun graduate school at Yale in 1986 when Blue Velvet was released. I went on opening night to the York Square Cinema, and the film changed my life. I immediately connected to Lynch’s take on the American landscape, its veneer of domestic order, and his exploration into its darker undercurrents. These were themes I had already been exploring myself, but Lynch conveyed them in such a shocking and visually beautiful way, with such immediacy and confidence. Blue Velvet seemed new and yet strangely familiar—the very definition of the uncanny—like a dream I could only partially remember or understand. As with all great art, it left me with more questions than answers, and it compelled me to turn back to my own work and dig deeper within myself. A series of photographs, Natural Wonder (1991–97), almost entirely grew out of my obsession with the opening sequence of Blue Velvet. I constructed tabletop dioramas of neighborhoods with picket fences, garden flowers, taxidermies of birds and insects, and human body parts morphing with nature in grotesque and bizarre ways. I took nearly a decade to work through this exhaustive artistic exercise, having absorbed Lynch’s influence and needing to express it in my own way. I was then able to move on to other concerns in my work, but I would not have gotten there in the same way without Lynch—which is how art and inspiration works. Lynch’s legacy is even more vast than his body of work, for it touched so many other artists, influenced the stories we tell, and informed the way we see the world.

Roe Ethridge

The way I remember it, Scott Vogel’s video class at Atlanta College of Art was the day after a Twin Peaks episode aired on television. Scott would tape it, and we would then watch it as students after having already watched it as rabid fans the night before. The lesson I think Scott was interested in, what he wanted us to grasp, was the way the show somehow passed through the narrows of prime time. We “deconstructed” every episode, though I’m not sure that’s what we were doing. Really it was more like marveling at the skill, the show’s beauty and terror, both sublime and banal. I think what I saw was how a real artist could use the most ubiquitous venue to make the most shocking and radical images and stories. In a way, it was the most American thing ever: Twin Peaks was prime time.

Todd Hido

In 2017, Paul Moakley from Time magazine offered me what is still one of my favorite editorial assignments ever. A new limited series of Twin Peaks was about to air, twenty-five years after its first season, in 1990, changed television storytelling forever. Paul recognized the kinship between David Lynch’s work and mine, the way that we were both concerned with the darker, more uneasy side of American suburban life, and he sent me to northern Washington to shoot a photo-essay inspired by the locations of the original series.

As a native of Kent, Ohio, who had moved to Oakland, California, I had already spent the last fifteen years going up to Washington state, since it served as a visual surrogate for the dark winters of my childhood landscapes. For this photo-essay, I established a working area within a two-hour radius of Snoqualmie and set out to photograph anything that left an impression on me, looking for things that felt as if they had the essence of Lynch’s darkness. Like many great narratives, the final setting was the sum of many parts and places. I made this picture of Mount Si Motel one rainy evening in North Bend, Washington.

Tania Franco Klein

The Lynchian universe is captivating, to say the least, with its intense, colorful, and atmospheric surfaces. Once they catch you, they invite you to experience a dark underbelly full of uncanny symbolism, which is surprisingly constructed with the most ordinary elements.

On a less visual and a more psychological and subtle level, the absurdist and abstract narratives of his films, created with mundane elements, were always more fascinating to me. Surrealism is a term often thought of when describing his masterful work, but the absurdism and broken narratives, full of dark holes and ambiguity, always felt more assimilated to the way I experience life and felt more accurate than a perfectly wrapped storyline in which everything is overexplained. Strange events never felt more seductive and complex than in his universe, and I found it hard to resist incorporating many of these fascinating elements into my practice.

Jarod Lew

I remember watching Blue Velvet for the first time and being captivated by the absurdity of certain scenes in that film. In the dark basement of a suburban home, I sat around with friends as the glow of an early ’90s television filled the room, and the song “Blue Velvet” filled all our ears. I remember asking myself many times, How does one come up with an idea like that? Why does this feel so real? It wasn’t until later in my life that I watched the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life and realized that the scenes I was most perplexed by, truly haunted by, were scenes that came from his experience as a child. His memories had infused his works so seamlessly. It’s powerful to think that our most visionary endeavors can emerge from simply remembering our past.

Alec Soth

I discovered David Lynch as a teenager—the same time I discovered art. Living in exurban Minnesota, I found it miraculous that someone could unearth so much mystery in places like North Carolina (Blue Velvet) and Washington state (Twin Peaks). After visiting his dream worlds, every middle-American street looked like a portal to somewhere dark and magical.

Yelena Yemchuk

Once in a blue moon we are blessed with a visionary artist who can transform our reality. An artist who can pick us up and drop us in an unfamiliar world—a world that feels simultaneously immediate and elusive. A world with so much light and darkness. A world where dreams rule, and time has no rules.

David Lynch, you know what it feels like to be there—in the place beyond description. You have been taking me there since I was fifteen. When I saw Blue Velvet, I came out of the theater a different me. Thank you for being my biggest inspiration and for teaching me to follow my absolute vision and to not be afraid of telling a different story, one that people might not understand. Thank you for inspiring me to work from my dreams and allow chance and accident to coexist with the “plan.” I learned to keep my eyes wide open for mysteries to reveal themselves without ever having to explain them. You are forever the greatest, David Lynch.

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