Aperture Ideas – serie

In Photography After Frank, former New York Times writer and picture editor Philip Gefter presents the tale of contemporary photography, starting with a pivotal moment: Robert Frank’s seminal work in the 1950s. Along the way, he connects the dots of photography’s transformation into what it is today. Gefter begins with Frank’s challenge to the notion of photography’s objectivity with the grainy, off-handed spontaneity of The Americans. Next comes the “staged document” and postmodernism’s further challenge to image fidelity. Other themes are photojournalism, the diversity of portraiture, the influence of private and corporate collections on curatorial decisions, and how the market shapes art making. Throughout the book, Gefter deftly connects Frank’s legacy with the work of dozens of important individual artists who followed in his wake, from Lee Friedlander and Nan Goldin to Stephen Shore and Ryan McGinley. The book includes texts written exclusively for this publication as well as essays drawn from Gefter’s critical writings, reviews, and even obituaries. Photography After Frank offers a page-turning yet journalistic approach bound to appeal to students and artworld aficionados, alike.

Peter C. Bunnell has been a major force in shaping the discourse about photography. This collection of texts—selected from work published throughout Bunnell’s career— marks his significant contribution to the field he has helped to establish. In each of the thirty-four essays, each devoted to individual (predominantly American) photographers and three key galleries, Bunnell brings to bear his distinctive sensibility and insight. While encouraging the reader to see previously overlooked aspects of the images he discusses so eloquently, he also provides an invaluable historical context for the photographers and their work. Bunnell offers a unique personal perspective on the world of art photography, documenting its journey as it morphed from a small group of practitioners to the supercharged international marketplace of today.

The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of the field’s eminent critics and popular writers. In this new volume of essays, Badger offers insight into some of his favorite images, artists, and themes, drawing upon nearly three decades of experience writing and thinking about photography. With deep discernment and a readable mixture of scholarly finesse and wit, Badger describes the meanings of work by dozens of photographers, from Dorothea Lange and Eugène Atget to Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Susan Lipper, and Paul Graham. Among the broader topics discussed are the photobook, where Badger believes “photography sings its loudest and most complex song,” and Photoshop’s role in art-making. An interlude at the heart of the book pairs the author’s evocative meditations with nearly a dozen particular images. Alongside some of Badger’s classics, The Pleasures of Good Photographs showcases primarily new essays, making it an important addition to the canon of photographic writing.

Known internationally for his articles in the New York Times and other publications, Andy Grundberg has been one of the most respected and widely read voices in photography and the visual arts for nearly thirty years. His interpretations and critical opinions have helped shape the broad understanding of photography’s complex roles in art and the media. Over the course of the fifty essays and articles in this authoritative collection, Grundberg questions the nature of photography and how we perceive it, reevaluates some of the great photographers of our time, and brings into focus the major debates in photography at the end of the twentieth century. Although some essays were originally written more than thirty years ago, the issues and concerns addressed by Grundberg are still relevant today. Aperture is pleased to reissue Crisis of the Real, a classic publication of important writings. This is an essential work for anyone seeking clarity and insight into photography’s place in today’s world.

Twenty years ago, before the era of digital cameras, cell phones, Photoshop, and the World Wide Web, Fred Ritchin presciently outlined many of the ways in which the digital age would transform society. His groundbreaking book, In Our Own Image, the first to address “the coming revolution in photography,” asked pointed and sometimes chilling questions that are increasingly relevant today, including whether democracy can survive the erosion of media accelerated by facile use of digital means. By the time a second edition was published in 1999, many of Ritchin’s predictions had come true: computer embellishment of imagery had become a staple in the media and, given the widespread use of graphic so!ware, had significantly diminished photography’s special role as a credible witness: Newsday had published the first “future” news photograph of two feuding ice skaters as they would meet the next day, and on its cover, Time magazine darkened and blurred an image of the celebrity O. J. Simpson in order to li! “a common police mug shot to the level of art, with no sacrifice to truth.” Aperture is pleased to reissue this seminal text, which has continued to shape the debate about digital imaging since its initial publication. This twentiethanniversary edition features a preface by the author that contextualizes the book for a contemporary audience.

A leading voice in the field of photography criticism, Vicki Goldberg is well known for her cogent and perceptive writing. Aperture is pleased to release in paperback Light Matters, a selection of this remarkable author’s essays and criticism culled from the past twenty-five years. Goldberg’s take on photography is both insightful and expansive: her subjects range from pop icons to the imagery of death, from the commercial use of journalistic images to the onslaught of sexual content in art photography. She casts new light on the work of the medium’s masters, including Evans, Brassaï, and Arbus, while writing with equal acuity about contemporary trailblazers such as Eleanor Antin and Martin Parr. Dismissing clichés and de!ly negotiating the many diverging paths photography now fol lows, Goldberg demonstrates how to consider not just photographic images themselves, but their impact. Light Matters showcases a writer of great intelligence, wit, and insight, whose understanding of this multifarious and evolving medium is unsurpassed.

Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography is the long-awaited collection of essays, reviews, and lectures—some of which have gained a cult following due to online postings—by Tod Papageorge, one of the most influential voices in photography today. As a photographer and the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale University School of Art, Papageorge has shaped the work and thought of generations of artist/photographers, and, through his critical writings, has earned a reputation as an unusually eloquent and illuminating guide to the work of many of the most important figures in twentiethcentury photography. Among the artists Papageorge discusses with deep critical insight in this essential volume are Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Robert Frank (with Walker Evans), Robert Adams, and his close friend, Garry Winogrand. The book also includes texts that examine the more general questions of photography’s relationship to poetry, and how the evolution of the medium’s early technologies led to the twentieth-century creation of the self-conscious artist/photographer. Among the previously unpublished pieces in Core Curriculum are an unfinished poem in response to Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a profile of Josef Koudelka, and a commencement speech delivered at the Yale School of Art in 2004. Core Curriculum also includes a number of interviews with this esteemed photographer/teacher/author, ranging in topic from his own photographic work and background in poetry to his energetic observations on the art of photography.

We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference offers an unparalleled firsthand account of the influential photographer and curator Sunil Gupta’s writing and critical inquiry since the 1970s.Newspaper articles, speeches, and essays show Gupta’s crucial role at the center of grassroots queer and postcolonial organizing throughout an artistic career lived between Canada, the UK, and India. In his pieces about homosexuality in Indian cities, the AIDS crisis, the Black Arts Movement, or key figures including Joy Gregory and Robert Mapplethorpe, Gupta foregrounds the power of cultural activism in the politically fraught contexts of London and Delhi, and illuminates the essential connections between queer migration and self-discovery. Continually questioning given forms of identity, Gupta offers artists and curators multiple strategies of resistance, carving out space for new ways of imagining what it might mean to live, love, and create.

A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery. —Rebecca BengalIn Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to pioneering artists and the personal and political stories surrounding their images. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for thehouses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative portraits and explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.