In the late 1970s, as gay men in San Francisco experienced a new sense of freedom following the Stonewall Uprising, Hal Fischer made Gay Semiotics, a photo-text project that categorized denizens of the Castro and Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods by social type such as the “jock” or the “hippie.” Sly and systematic, Fischer portrayed the sartorial codes of queer street style—earrings, handkerchiefs, jeans, or leather—that broadcast a range of desires to potential sexual prospects. The series became an influential record of a libertine era before AIDS, the rise of internet dating apps, and tech industry–accelerated gentrification transformed queer life forever. Tracing the formation of an essential American artist, Hal Fischer: Seminal Works includes Gay Semiotics together with Fischer’s rarely seen early photography and features essays that offer vital new perspectives on the history of San Francisco and the resonance of the gay rights movement across generations.

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. Spanning all thirteen original colonies and beyond—from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida—US Route 1 formed over the course of three hundred years from connecting sections of what was once known as the Atlantic Highway. Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations on life along Route 1 and on the seventieth anniversary of her project, Florida-based photographer Anastasia Samoylova ventures on her own journey to revisit those communities forever transformed by the interstate. Working in color and black and white, Samoylova provides a closer look at the American landscape irreversibly altered by the unrelenting expansion of industry, commerce, and development, as well as the displacement and tenacity of people and wildlife.

Copublished by Aperture and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

]]> https://aperture.org/books/at-the-limits-of-the-gaze/ Sun, 19 Oct 2025 12:49:13 +0000 https://aperture.org/?post_type=product&p=283463 The first English-language collection of Takuma Nakahira’s influential writings on photography.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the first time. 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). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. 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.”

To celebrate Mitchell’s first survey monograph, Aperture is pleased to present this special collectors’ edition of Wish This Was Real, which includes three custom metallic covers, based on artworks originally printed by Mitchell as unique mirror works, and two posters, all enclosed in a deluxe folder. Each edition—limited to 100 copies and printed by Trifolio, in Verona, Italy—is signed and numbered by Mitchell.

The proceeds from the sale of this collectors’ edition directly supports the artist and Aperture’s nonprofit publishing, educational, and public programs.

Ground Rules is the first comprehensive, fully bilingual survey charting the career of the prolific photographer Alejandro Cartagena. 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 deploys a diverse array of photographic formats, from documentary and collage to the appropriation of vernacular photographs and AI-generated imagery, all unified by Cartagena’s commitment to addressing Mexico’s most pressing social and environmental issues with humor and pathos.

Published to coincide with a mid-career solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on view from November 2025 through May 2026.

Tyler Mitchell’s photography is animated by dreams of paradise and joy against the backdrop of history. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion, Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Wish This Was Real is the definitive early-career survey of Mitchell’s work, offering a comprehensive look into the subjects driving his artistic practice, from his genre-bending portraits made in the United States, Europe, and West Africa to his photographs printed on diaphanous fabrics and sculptures that reference Black intellectual heritage. Presenting 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.

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real was made possible, in part, through lead support from Coach. Aperture gratefully acknowledges additional support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. For their generous contributions, Aperture also wishes to thank Dr. Kathryn Beal, David Dechman and Michael Mercure, Béryl and Rex Hamilton, Pamela Thomas-Graham, Michael Hoeh, Cathy M. Kaplan, and Yesim and Dusty Philip.

Tyler Mitchell’s photography is animated by dreams of paradise and joy against the backdrop of history. Since his rise to prominence in the worlds of art and fashion, Mitchell has created images of beauty, utopia, and the American landscape that expand the imaginary of Blackness in the twenty-first century. Wish This Was Real is the definitive early-career survey of Mitchell’s work, offering a comprehensive look into the subjects driving his artistic practice, from his genre-bending portraits made in the United States, Europe, and West Africa to his photographs printed on diaphanous fabrics and sculptures that reference Black intellectual heritage. Presenting 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.

Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real was made possible, in part, through lead support from Coach. Aperture gratefully acknowledges additional support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. For their generous contributions, Aperture also wishes to thank Dr. Kathryn Beal, David Dechman and Michael Mercure, Béryl and Rex Hamilton, Pamela Thomas-Graham, Michael Hoeh, Cathy M. Kaplan, and Yesim and Dusty Philip.

A Reprise, David Alekhuogie’s first monograph, confronts the intriguing legacy of narrative and authorship behind Western presentations of African art, and poses timely questions about how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued, and interpreted today. In 1935, Walker Evans was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to photograph hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art. Nearly ninety years later, Alekhuogie began investigating Evans’s images, provocatively remixing them into his own vibrant and multilayered photographic collages. Transposing facsimiles of Evans’s original images onto cardboard or paper structures of his own making, Alekhuogie rephotographs these image-sculptures against striking backdrops—often using East and West African textiles—thereby inviting multiple dimensions of viewership. Alekhuogie’s images draw upon the musical idiom of the reprise—a performance of repetition—and stake a claim to crucial, restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.

Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, Vik Muniz—whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images—shares his creative practice and discusses a wide range of topics, from generating ideas and creating artworks that challenge viewers’ perceptions, to thinking through collaboration, imperfection, and the interplay of subject, scale, and material.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book’s first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido’s major monographs, “The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken.” From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.