Aperture – förlag

In fall 2012, the hardcover edition of this book was released to critical acclaim and received several awards, including the 2013 American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for its innovative collaborative approach and design. Now available in a smaller, more afford - able paperback edition, Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photo-graphic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff ’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book, however, is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.

A celebrated return of Robert Frank’s seminal photobook The Americans to Aperture’s catalog—one of the most important bodies of photographic work ever made.In the nearly seven decades since its publication in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, 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. Frank’s point of view—at once startling and tenacious—is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a poignant and incomparable portrait of the nation at a turning point in history.This edition of The Americans is a celebrated return of an iconic title to Aperture’s catalog, more than a half-century after the Aperture and Museum of Modern Art edition was published in 1968. Presented on the centennial of Frank’s birth and coinciding with a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, it has been produced following the finest tritone printing from the 2008 edition for which Frank was personally involved in every step of the design and production. Frank’s exacting vision, distinct style, and poetic insight changed the course of twentieth-century photography, and influenced subsequent generations of photographers, including Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Danny Lyon, Joel Meyerowitz, Ed Ruscha, and Garry Winogrand. Now extolled as one of the most groundbreaking photobooks of all time, The Americans remains as powerful and provocative as it was upon publication and continues to resonate with audiences today.

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence—even something of a legend—among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972— along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art—offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented. The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation. Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it. This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.

Following on the heels of Martin Parr’s limited-edition, album-style presentation of Life’s a Beach, released last season, Aperture is delighted to introduce a new beach-bag-sized edition. Parr has been photographing beaches for many decades, documenting all aspects of them, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the launch of The Last Resort, a 1986 book depicting the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool. What may be less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches around the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and of course, the U.K. The compilation brings to the forefront Parr’s engagement with a cherished subject matter—that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together. This book shows Parr at his best, startling us with moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido’s career, with ten years of new work.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.

A rare glimpse into the mind and artistic process of one of the world’s greatest photographers.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.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of a timeless photobook by Joel Meyerowitz.Cape Light, Joel Meyerowitz’s series of serene and contemplative color photographs taken on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, quickly became one of the most influential and popular photography books in the latter part of the twentieth century at its publication in 1978, breaking new ground both for color photography and for the medium’s acceptance into the art world. Now, nearly fifty years later, Aperture is pleased to reissue this classic photobook.The book features the now-iconic images of the original edition, newly remastered and printed as never before. In it, everyday scenes—an approaching storm, a local grocery store at dusk, the view through a bedroom window—are transformed by the stunning light of Cape Cod and the luminous vision of the photographer. Meyerowitz is a contemporary master of color photography, and through his eyes small-town life on the Cape is imbued with a powerful and captivating beauty.

First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a contemporary classic by one of photography’s most renowned photographers. To mark the book’s thirtieth anniversary, Aperture is reoriginating it in a masterful facsimile edition that retains the purity of the original. At Twelve is Sally Mann’s revealing, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls on the verge of adulthood. To be young and female in America is a time of tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive 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.” The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. The young women in Mann’s unflinching, large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer’s gaze with a disturbing equanimity. Poet Jonathan Williams writes, “Sally Mann’s girls are the ones who do the hard looking in At Twelve—be up to it!”This reissue of At Twelve has been printed using new scans and separations from Mann’s prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a freshness and sumptuousness true to the original edition.

An intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artistsThroughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef Koudelka considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects—from his early theater work, to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape. Josef Koudelka: Next embraces all of Koudelka’s projects and his evolution as an artist in the context of his life story and working process, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and world of this notoriously private photographer. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of almost a decade with Koudelka—as well as ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide—this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer. Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris has independently crafted a unique, in-depth, and revelatory personal history of both the man and his photography.Josef Koudelka: Next is richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, including many biographical and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, as well as iconic images from his work, from the 1950s to the present. The visual presentation is conceived in collaboration with Koudelka himself, as well as his longtime collaborator, Czech designer Aleš Najbrt.Copublished by Aperture and Magnum Foundation

To ensure the ongoing availability of Diane Arbus Revelations, Aperture is proud to release this vitally important volume on the fiftieth anniversary of the posthumous 1972 Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the simultaneous publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. Revelations explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of Arbus's wholly original voice. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world.The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career. It also includes a new contribution by Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture, alongside essays by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography, emeritus, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. An extensive chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, is illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed primarily of excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounting to a kind of autobiography. An afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues, compiled by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

In The Photography Workshop Series, Aperture Foundation 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. Each book features the creative process and core thinking of a photographer told in their own words and through pictures of their choosing. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Todd Hido explores the genres of landscape, interior, and nude photography, with an emphasis on creating images from a personal perspective and with a sense of intimacy. Through words and photographs, he reveals insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, including mining one’s own memory and experience as inspiration; using light, texture, and detail for greater impact; exploring the narrative potential activated when sequencing images; and creating powerful stories with emotional weight and beauty.

In this series, Aperture Foundation 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. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, internationally acclaimed color photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, offer their expert insight into street photography and the poetic image. Through words and photographs—their own and others’—they invite the reader into the heart of their artistic processes. They share their thoughts about a wide range of practical and philosophical issues, from questions about seeing and being in the world with a camera, to how to shape a complete body of work in a way that’s both structured and intuitive.

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.”

In a new body of work, a critically acclaimed photographer retraces Berenice Abbott’s 1954 photographic journey along the Eastern Seaboard, documenting dislocation, loss, and a shifting American dream.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.

In The Photography Workshop Series, Aperture Foundation 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. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Mary Ellen Mark—well-known for her pictures' emotional power, be they of people or animals—offers her insight on observing the world and capturing dramatic moments that reveal more than the reality at hand. Through words and pictures, she shares her own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from gaining the trust of the subject and taking pictures that are controlled but unforced, to organizing the frame so that every part contributes toward telling the story.

In the seventh installment of The Photography Workshop Series, Catherine Opie—well known for dynamic portraits and landscapes that speak to identity and community—offers insight into creating photographs that navigate the contemporary landscape, as well as the landscape of the body and constructed identity.Aperture Foundation 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. 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, in this volume Catherine Opie shares her creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from representing subcultures and marginalized communities, to making confrontational work that reimagines and subverts expectations.

Alex Webb captures in bold color the vitality of city life in the US—rich with visual rhythm and chance encounters—seeing the quintessential elements of American self-invention and improvisation.In Walking Blues, the acclaimed street photographer Alex Webb traverses some forty cities across the United States, documenting moments of connection between communities with his signature eye for bold color and rhythm. Webb was inspired by the lift and pull of blues music, a quintessential American musical form that scores the nation’s history, and his photographs express the improvisation of chance encounters. The culmination of more than a decade of intuitive, open-minded exploration, Webb’s latest book is a vivid chronicle of urban life today.

A propulsive inquiry into the elusive nature of time, light, and history.

Lee Friedlander’s latest monograph captures the irony and complexity of American life, past and present.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.

An economic and cultural revolution has shaken the photobook world in the last five years: self-publishing. An army of photographers operating as publishers have had an instrumental role in today’s photobook renaissance. This book offers a do-it-yourself manual and a survey of key examples of self-published success stories, as well as a self-publishing manifesto and list of resources. The manual portion of this volume offers insight, advice, and rudimentary how-tos for the photographer interested in self-publishing. The survey offers an overview of the contemporary self-publishing landscape and includes a contribution by the Museum of Modern Art’s art librarian and bibliographer David Senior, which grounds today’s activities in a legacy of artists’ books and collectives. The case studies themselves will each illustrate a particular theme and genre of self-publishing (such as diary, documentary, or conceptual object), and will be accompanied by personal testimonies from the artists who created them. Author Bruno Ceschel, founder of the Self Publish, Be Happy organization, provides a rallying cry for all those involved in the contemporary photobook revolution—a moment in which the photobook, in all its infinitesimal manifestations, has never before been so omnipresent in our cultural landscape, nor so critical to the photographer’s practice. Self Publish, Be Happy, founded by Bruno Ceschel in 2010, collects, studies, and celebrates self-published photobooks through an ongoing program of workshops, live events, and on/ offline projects. Its London-based collection contains more than two thousand publications. Self Publish, Be Happy is the physical manifestation of a worldwide online community formed of a new, ever-evolving generation of young artists, who experiment, stretch, and play with the medium of photography.

The best way to learn is by doing. The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals. Whether you’re looking for exercises to improve your craft—alone or in a group—or you’re interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with photographic process. Inside you will find advice for better shooting and editing, creative ways to start new projects, games and activities, and insight into the practices of those responsible for our most iconic photographs—John Baldessari, Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jim Goldberg, Miranda July, Susan Meiselas, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Tim Walker, and many more. The book also features a Polaroid alphabet by Mike Slack, which divides each chapter, and a handy subject guide. Edited by acclaimed photographers Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, the assignments and project ideas in this book are indispensable for teachers and students, and great fun for everyone fascinated by taking pictures.

The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines 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. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them.Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times.

The first monograph by the New Black Vanguard’s Arielle Bobb-Willis is a vivid statement about color, gesture, and style.Keep the Kid Alive, Arielle Bobb-Willis’s first book, 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 tableaus, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. “I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way,” Bobb-Willis says. “It’s important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.” With a conversation between Bobb-Willis and a dynamic range of artists, stylists, and creatives who speak about keeping their “inner kid” alive, this book captures a definitive young artist’s unconventional worldbuilding.

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 reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. “I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals,” says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes—paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer). Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate and engrossing diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection, recounted through documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera.Diana Markosian: Father presents the photographer’s journey to another place and another time, where Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger—her long-lost father. The book explores her father’s absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. The images, made over the course of a decade, take place in her father’s home in Armenia. In Markosian’s first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Father uses both documentary photographs and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the fifteen years of absence and separation from the photographer’s childhood. In this voyage of self-discovery, Markosian touchingly 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?”

In May 1971, Artforum , bastion of late modernism, featured the work of a photographer for the very first time. On its cover and in a six-page spread, it announced the publication of a portfolio, A box of ten photographs , by Diane Arbus. In the words of the magazine’s editor, Philip Leider, “The portfolio changed everything . . . one could no longer deny [photography’s] status as art.” At the time of Arbus’s death, two months later, only four of the intended edition of fifty had been sold. Two had been purchased by Richard Avedon (the first for himself, the second as a gift for his friend Mike Nichols); another was purchased by Jasper Johns; and a fourth by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar . Arbus signed the prints in all four sets; each print was accompanied by an interleaving vellum slip-sheet inscribed with an extended caption. For Feitler, Arbus added an eleventh photograph, A woman with her baby monkey, N.J. , 1971.Acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1986—and the only one of the four completed and sold by Arbus that is publicly held—that portfolio is the subject of an exhibition on view at the museum from April through September 2018. This exceptional book replicates the nature of Diane Arbus’s original and now legendary object. Smithsonian curator John P. Jacob, who has unearthed a trove of new information in preparing the book and exhibition, weaves a fascinating tale of the creation, production, and continuing repercussions of this seminal work.

Brooklyn is one of the most dynamic and ethnically diverse places on the planet. In fact, it’s estimated that one in every eight US families had relatives come through Brooklyn when settling in the country. Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb have been photographing this New York City borough for the past seven years, creating a profound and vibrant portrait. Alex Webb has traversed every corner of the borough, exploring its tremendous diversity. This parallels his work made in the past forty years, traveling to photograph different cultures around the world—all of which are represented in the place he now calls home. Contrasting with this approach, Rebecca Norris Webb photographed “the city within the city within the city,” the green heart of Brooklyn—the Botanic Garden, Green-Wood Cemetery, and Prospect Park, where Brooklynites of all walks of life cross paths as they find solace. Together, their photographs of Brooklyn tell a larger American story, one that touches on immigration, identity, and home.

Sixty years after its publication, The Flame of Recognition continues to offer unmatched insight into the mind, life, and work of a twentieth-century icon.This classic monograph, first issued as a hardcover volume in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine. Drawing on a decades-long collaboration between the photographer and Nancy Newhall, Aperture cofounder and Museum of Modern Art curator, The Flame of Recognition brings together a sequence of images and excerpts from Weston’s writing in an effort to channel 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.”In 2015, Aperture reissued the book on its fiftieth anniversary, and ten years later Aperture is pleased to present the sixtieth anniversary edition in an elegant paperback edition. The Flame of Recognition covers the range of Weston’s greatest works, from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still lifes. Accompanying and amplifying the images are Weston’s own thoughts, excerpted from his now-famed Daybooks and letters. Others who contributed to the making of the book include two of the artist’s sons, Brett and Cole, and two other Aperture cofounders, filmmaker and author Dody Weston Thompson and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist. A brief bibliography as well as a chronology offer further insight into the life and work of this giant of twentieth-century photography.