Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2024 i Aperture

Farah Al Qasimi describes her aesthetic as “so-muchness.” Inspired by everything from SpongeBob SquarePants to Octavia Butler’s dystopian novels, the Emirati-raised maximalist tends toward extravagant ornamentation and sly obfuscation in her photographs, which filter consumer culture, futurist kitsch, and the trappings of femininity through a dizzying postcolonial lens to examine how images shape desire on both global and intimate scales. THE ARAB APOCALYPSE I don’t think there’s anything I can say about Etel Adnan’s book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse (1989) that will do it any justice. It’s riotous, haunting, and visually rich. When I read it, the voice in my head wants to scream. MURDER, SHE WROTE Hear me out. MSW is one of those shows that’s easy to turn a nose up at, because it’s always on. My mother…

River Road descended from soybean fields into swampland on the drive to Jude’s house. The covered dish rode shotgun. I went under the speed limit to avoid any jostling since I had plated the portions so carefully, arranging all of Jude’s favorite foods in a spiral pattern. Corn pie, butter beans, red rice, and turkey breast formed the petals. For the center, I set three bright lemon twists in a bold red dollop of cranberry sauce like a pistil and stigma. The whole dish looked like a blossom. I knew my cousin would appreciate it. He was a botanist. A professor emeritus of botany. Black water mirrored the sunset through cypress trees. I didn’t come back here often enough. In my youth, my hunter uncles had taught me how to…

It seems strange to say such a thing, as we are repeatedly informed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, aside, perhaps, from a few rough bits around the edges. But anyone who pays any attention at all can see immediately that this is not true. The reality of ecological crisis stares every sane observer in the face, with accelerating climate breakdown and mass destruction of species. And we confront an obvious social crisis, too, with billions of people unable to meet even their most basic needs, such as nutritious food and clean water. These are not difficult problems to solve. Maintaining a stable biosphere? Ensuring people have access to essential goods? These are basics, and easy to achieve. They should be the first principles of any…

Dalia Al-Dujaili: Tell me about your journey into bookmaking, curation, and design. Roï Saade: After a few years in the corporate world, I felt the need to get out of it and work toward something more creatively fulfilling. While studying graphic design at USEK University, in Lebanon, I had taken some photography courses. I found that photography was a means to access communities that I don’t belong to, to break these religious and social barriers and just explore Beirut. And photobooks allowed me to work at the intersection of design and photography. As an editor, I want to recognize work that is not being acknowledged by the industry’s gatekeepers, and to counter stereotypical depictions of West Asia and the Arab world. My practice is very research-driven and relies on close…

Over the last decade, the Art Gallery of Ontario embarked on an initiative to incorporate twentieth-century photography detailing life in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico into its collections. Beyond poetic images created by Graciela Iturbide and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the Toronto museum also houses photographs of protests and coups. Such grim subjects might be expected in a Latin American collection: during the latter half of the century, the region was convulsed by civil wars, a genocide, dictatorship, and murderous US intervention. One recent acquisition provides an unexpected twist: lushly colored images by Rafael Goldchain, a Chilean-born photographer of Polish Jewish heritage, who settled in Toronto in the 1970s and in the mid-1980s traveled on a grant to Mexico and Central America. There, he took pictures of…

“Nor breath nor motion”—the container ships in these photographs by Richard Misrach have the deathly stillness of the becalmed vessel in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, stuck “As idle as a painted ship. /Upon a painted ocean.” On the one hand, here are seascapes of benign sublimity, silver light and grisaille clouds, golden dawns and jewel lights reflected in a smoked-glass sea. A scale and spectacle that Misrach has long embraced in his work, knowingly courting a Romanticism just on the edge of kitschy vacancy. But then there are the ships, ranged in San Francisco Bay, seemingly rooted in this leaden expanse like artificial islands or menacing fortresses. In Cargo Ships (2021–ongoing), begun during the COVID epidemic, the stranded freighters look like monuments—but to what? In…

i recently clocked into interview a very famous personat not even half the worth of my time giventhe need to corral precursivelya completely wild feeling inside my headover and over he would insert “just”before the predicate noun he chose to describewhat were in fact indescribableriddlesirreducible forms of troubleviolent confrontations between the inside and outside of a given living hostwhat he has doneis eliminate a reductive grammar from the realm of picturesit is his achievement; it is not emotional not like what i dogenerative of envythe technological glamour of his work; its digital appendagesawareness of envy “just”printingfor examplethe edit suitethat has to be consulted along withseveral of the world’s great technicians of pictures in order to isolatewhat he seesas possibilityto learn that the machines cannot make it possible then “just”returning to…

Robert Frank spent the summer of 1972 crisscrossing America—not in pursuit of the lyrical social documentary for which he was already famed, but as part of the Rolling Stones’ forty-eight-date mobile bacchanal. It had been three years since the disastrous show at the Altamont Speedway, and the band was stateside again, on the heels of a recording session in the south of France that is now etched in the annals of debauched rock excess. The tour was no exception—sex and drugs and everything else, all later mordantly recounted by Truman Capote to Andy Warhol in the pages of the magazine named for the group. The novelist registered his surprise that so much of it was unabashedly documented, that Frank was always there, camera at hand. In many ways, the tour…

Grandpa wearing his best Sunday suit, the second cousin’s first communion, the aunt who made it big as a singer in Bollywood, a family member whose name nobody can ever remember in costume at the carnival parade, the uncle who moved to Brazil never to return but kept sending gifts and photographs. These are some of the images one may encounter in Goa Familia, an archive documenting family histories through vernacular photography, with highlights presented as an installation each year in Panjim, Goa’s capital. Last December, I visited its third edition, curated by Akshay Mahajan and Lina Vincent and titled Let the Sound Linger, hinting at the potential of both songs and photographs to remain in one’s mind well after being heard or seen. There were few original prints—perhaps they…

Emmet Gowin came to photography via a teenage revelation in a dentist’s office in Danville, Virginia. It was the late 1950s. Flipping through magazines in the waiting room, the minister’s son landed on an Ansel Adams photograph of a burned tree stump sprouting fresh shoots. Out loud, he exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, this is the Christ.” Now, Gowin says, “Thank God nobody else was there. But to me, it was clear. This was the transformation of death into life.” He went home and asked to borrow the family camera. Gowin would first become known for his stunningly open and intimate photographs of his wife, Edith, and her extended family in 1960s and 1970s rural Virginia, pictures Robert Adams has described as “a lovely testament of close-in wonder and affection.” While…

Mary Frey Mary Frey’s photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s offer a lesson in the creative power of staying close to home. The microdramas that form her latest book, My Mother, My Son (TBW, 2024; 72 pages, $50), an edit, from her archive, of images made over four decades, unfold in subtly menacing domestic interiors: aggressively patterned wallpapers induce vertigo; a baby sits unattended and vulnerable on a stark, improbably long sofa; two young men with Pre-Raphaelite flowing hair pose in a dungeon-like basement. Snakes, birds, rabbits, and a ventriloquist doll are all found in or around the homes. Couples dance in front of a banal office building; groups of people gaze off into the distance, witnesses to events outside the frame. Her cast of white, middle-class suburbanites…