Renowned for her boldly intimate portraits of everyday Puerto Ricans in New York City, Sophie Rivera (1938–2021; born in New York) began her career in the 1970s, becoming part of a coalition of artists who sought to counter negative depictions of Latinos in US popular culture. Her portraits, street photographs, cityscapes, graffiti-art photographs, and experimental self-portraits bolstered her as a trailblazing artist engaged with feminist and political consciousness. Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, published to coincide with a major exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York, features photographs, contact sheets, and artist statements alongside vivid new scholarship that places Rivera at the center of Latine and feminist art, as well as within the history of contemporary photography in the United States.

Lee’s formal interventions and innovative darkroom techniques—including rephotographing found imagery from wilderness survival manuals and using graphite pencils to create inscriptions on her photographs of the landscape—weave together new narratives that address themes of dispossession, loss, survival, and resilience. Dionne Lee: Currents, the artist’s first monograph, brings together key works from over a decade of Lee’s career alongside essays by award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy and curator Eric Booker, as well as an interview with the artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, offering a deeper look at a visionary artist reshaping how we see­—and choose to imagine—the great outdoors.

Distilled from sixty‑nine journals kept over the course of fifty‑plus years, Josef Koudelka: Diaries offers a look inside the mind and artistic process of the iconoclastic Czech photographer renowned for a life in exile and legendary projects on the Roma, the 1968 Soviet-led invasion in Prague, and the devastating impact humans have on the landscape. Facsimile pages from the diaries, along with images by the photographer, including self‑portraits, lend the volume an immediacy and authenticity. As curator Tomáš Pospěch writes, “Koudelka’s diaries are a ‘cookbook’ of classic photography. He associated with the most renowned photographers. His notes sum up his rich experience, including with the now‑vanishing technology of analog black‑and‑white photography. His remarks, quips, and stories reappear, just as he repeatedly made resolutions, affirmed the rules he had adopted, and recalled earlier events and dreams.” Diaries is a perfect companion to Josef Koudelka: Next (2023), the visual biography by Melissa Harris.

How does the United States seem, at once, so small and big, quiet and loud, phony and true? In his first Aperture monograph, Life Still, Lee Friedlander (born in Aberdeen, Washington, 1934) reimagines the presentation of his oeuvre at age ninety-one, bringing together rarely seen and unpublished images from the past sixty years alongside new work to stage a visual dialogue between past and present. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hua Hsu observes how these stubborn paradoxes of the American consciousness— the irony, humor, and self-conflict—remain as vivid today as they always have been. By seeing contradictions in the commonplace, Friedlander presents us with a book of enduring riddles about American culture.

Through subjects as diverse as old apartment blocks, human scars, kimono fabrics, personal belongings of the deceased, and even her own water-damaged prints, Ishiuchi Miyako manifests the invisible, capturing time, atmosphere, and memory in photographic form. Her work is at once deeply personal and evocative of the wider world hinted at by the traces recorded within the frame.

Since beginning her career in the 1970s, Ishiuchi has become one of Japan’s foremost photographers, leading the way for female practitioners in a scene that has traditionally been male dominated. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces charts the course of her practice over fifty years and identifies themes that resurface throughout her work, including her relationship with place, the passage of time, and the bodies and possessions of people, always with an emphasis on materiality and ephemerality.

Three thematic sections—Town, Skin & Scars and Things Left Behind—include series such as Yokosuka Story, which documents her hometown; 1 · 9 · 4 · 7, in which she photographed the hands and feet of fifty women born in the same year as her; and Frida, which catalogues the possessions of the artist Frida Kahlo. The major photographic series appear alongside lesser-known works and previously unpublished material. With extracts from Ishiuchi’s previous writings, an in-depth interview by Lena Fritsch, and a newly commissioned essay by Ishiuchi herself, the artist’s voice is present throughout.

Kinship & Community presents an inspiring example of collective self-representation from the final decades of official segregation in the United States. With more than 150 images of everyday Black life—created by Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a proud but overlooked regional culture while testifying to the power of photography as a social tool. These photographers, typically operating small businesses that provided portraiture, promotional images, and event documentation, worked with their communities to develop an enduring vision of hope and uplift. Many also contributed photos to newspapers, magazines, and civil rights organizations, sometimes focusing on political leaders and protests. But their primary subject was the everyday expression of a vibrant and self-sufficient Black culture—an exhilarating achievement in the wider context of entrenched racial oppression. Completing the book is a vivid new photographic essay by Rahim Fortune that takes up the archive’s legacy and places it firmly in the present tense.

Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.