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Aperture Releases “Counter Histories,” Produced with Magnum FoundationSpring Issue Presents Photographers Who Uncover Personal and Political Histories(New York—March 6, 2024) What creative possibilities are offered by the gaps, absences, and silences in historical records? This spring, Aperture magazine presents “Counter Histories,” an issue produced in collaboration with Magnum Foundation and informed by their ongoing Counter Histories grant initiative, featuring photographers from around the world who tell powerful stories about complex social and political histories.The issue will be launched at Magnum Foundation in New York in conjunction with an exhibition (on view from April 3 to June 26) featuring several of the photographers featured in the magazine whose work intervenes in state image archives. A second, related exhibition, presenting Counter Histories projects responding to family archives, will be on view at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, in Kingston, New York, from March 23 to May 26.In the “Counter Histories” issue, a global group of photographers questions dominant historical narratives to create layered portrayals of place, culture, and community. In Hong Kong, Billy H.C. Kwok collaborates with a grieving mother desperately searching for her son. In Nepal, Prasiit Sthapit investigates the complex role of musicians in the country’s Maoist insurrection. Alice Proujansky looks at her parents’ past as New Left activists in the United States, while Christopher Gregory-Rivera examines how Puerto Rican independence activists were surveilled for decades. And, in the years before Poland ousted a far-right government last fall, Agata Szymanska-Medina exposed how a nationalist party worked steadily to undermine an independent judiciary.For these artists, family and community are as essential as politics and memory. Stories of migration from Haiti to Philadelphia inspire Naomieh Jovin’s vibrant collages honoring her elders. Cédrine Scheidig engages with legacies of the Black diaspora, tracing her relationship to Afro-Caribbean history and community in French Guiana. In the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Lindokuhle Sobekwa reflects on the movement of Black migrant labor and builds what he describes as a “family tree” of the country. And Abdo Shanan, working in Algeria, builds a speculative archive for his own generation.“Building upon Magnum Foundation’s important work supporting documentary storytellers across the world, this issue considers how photographers, through an engagement with archives or by their own observational work, can present and examine contested histories in a fresh, imaginative way,” said Michael Famighetti, Editor in Chief, Aperture magazine.“More than just a topic or theme, we see ‘Counter Histories’ as an expanded and collaborative approach to historical inquiry and photographic storytelling,” Kristen Lubben, Magnum Foundation’s Executive Director said. “Revisiting and reframing the past in the context of the present, the artists featured in this project challenge the power structures embedded in archives and suggest the radical possibilities of alternative narratives.”

Aperture introduces a new look for the magazine with The Design Issue, featuring previously unpublished images by Luigi Ghirri, a profile of the artist and jewelry designer Coreen Simpson, interviews with the celebrated fashion designer Duro Olowu and the design writer Alice Rawsthorn, and dynamic portfolios that speak to the myriad ways in which the fields of photography and design are intertwined. The Design Issue also features three unique covers with images by David Hartt, Luigi Ghirri, and Dayanita Singh.Aperture continues to be designed by the award-winning, London-based studio A2/SW/HK. Updated elements include a refreshed cover and changes to typefaces, layout, and scale. 'This new, inviting format is inspired by the early issues of the magazine. We hope to honor the editorial spirit that has driven this publication since 1952: a commitment to presenting a spectrum of ideas and photography, from past and present, thoughtfully considered through engaging, approachable writing and a thoughtful design', said Michael Famighetti, editor in chief of Aperture.In The Design Issue Olowu speaks with the editor Dan Thawley about how his deep knowledge of photography has informed his fashion line. Thessaly La Force visits Coreen Simpson, who made portraits of New York City's artistic and nightlife scenes and later found success as a jewelry designer. Alice Rawsthorn speaks with Billie Muraben about how designers respond to evolving technology and politics. And Mimi Zeiger considers David Hartt's interventions with the built environment and iconic buildings, including Philip Johnson's Glass House.In elegant, spare images, Dayanita Singh presents her long-term engagement with the architects Geoffrey Bawa and Bijoy Jain. Luigi Ghirri's 1980s images from the Ferrari factory, in Italy, demonstrate the photographer's fascination with industrial design. New work by Daniel Shea, Paul Kooiker, and Nhu Xuan Hua show photography's boundless potential to tell stories about urban change, identity, and sartorial politics.This issue also features Avion Pearce, the winner of the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize, whose work will be presented in June at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York; columns feature Stefan Ruiz, Akihiko Okamura, and Olivia Laing; and features in The PhotoBook Review highlight Alexey Brodovitch's iconic art direction and Polymode, a bicoastal, queer, and minority-owned studio who are rethinking design histories.

How has the relationship between painting and photography evolved since the invention of the latter nearly two centuries ago? This spring, Aperture presents “Photography & Painting,” featuring artists from around the world who draw inspiration from both mediums in their work, illuminating how the dialogue between camera and canvas continues to unfold today in fascinating, unexpected ways.Aperture No. 258 is anchored by three in-depth conversations with Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Vija Celmins, and Christopher Wool—three of the most significant painters of their generations. Through different strategies, these artists integrate photographic surfaces into their work, collapsing mediums to find new ways of marking time and space and of expanding our sense of how memories can be represented, from Akunyili Crosby’s spellbinding meditations on Nigerian culture incorporating family and found photographs; to Christopher Wool’s conceptual images of urban decay, talismanic objects, and his own abstract paintings; to Vija Celmins’s painstaking renderings of ocean waves and galaxies. As Celmins tells the photographer Richard Learoyd, “My tools are like hours.” Rather than treat painting and photography as rivals, this issue frames them as sources of mutual inspiration. Brian Dillon examines photographers’ abiding fascination with the painter’s studio, drawing connections among Luigi Ghirri’s pictures of Giorgio Morandi’s atelier, Collier Schorr’s portraits of Nicole Eisenman, and Sally Mann’s tender trespass into Cy Twombly’s Virginia workspace. David Campany looks at the surprising resonances between gestural painting and photography in the 1950s, while Lucy Ives reflects on the misunderstood legacy of photorealism, showing how a movement long disparaged by critics continues to exert a powerful influence on younger artists. Elsewhere in the issue, Lynne Tillman rediscovers the photography of Pierre Bonnard, while Jarrett Earnest—looking at recent paintings of Britney Spears, Casablanca stills, and Judy Garland’s Dorothy—asks: Why are so many contemporary painters remaking famous images right now? And portfolios by Poppy Jones, Lia Darjes, and Shirana Shahbazi use painterly references to offer meditations on the past that reject nostalgia for more mysterious, unsettled attitudes toward memory. The cover of Aperture No. 258 features a 2021 work by Kunié Sugiura, whose hybrid, dreamlike forms have tested the limits of photographic expression for nearly six decades. Made of painted color blocks and X-rays of her body as well as those of strangers—transfixed by the X-ray’s spectra representations of the human form, she collected them while hospitalized in the 1990s and printed them in her own darkroom—the work is Sugiura’s first large-scale grid, and can be configured in various ways. In an essay coinciding with the retrospective of Sugiura’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the curator Erin O’Toole traces the artist’s career through its trials and triumphs. “We live in an age of images, an age of too-muchness, including a flood of art,” the editors write. “After around two hundred years of coexistence, photography and painting are still talking, still defining each other through an exchange of mark making and an examination of the surfaces around us that sometimes allows for fuller—and slower—experiences.”