Aperture Foundation
Authors Fred Ritchin, Tod Papageorge, Philip Gefter, Gerry Badger, Helen Gee, Alex Klein, Charlotte Cotton, Walead Beshty, Sarah Charlesworth, John Divola, Shannon Ebner
Created in 1952 by photographers and writers as “common ground for the advancement of photography,” Aperture today is a multi-platform publisher and center for the photo community. From our base in New York, we produce, publish, and present a program of photography projects, locally and internationally.
Series Titles
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Words Without Pictures was originally conceived by curator Charlotte Cotton as a means of creating spaces for discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic or curator was invited to contribute a short unillustrated essay about an aspect of emerging photography. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on its specific topic. Over the course of its month-long “life,” each essay received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested parties. All ... -
Photography After Frank, a page-turning look at contemporary photography by New York Times writer and former picture editor Philip Gefter, takes Robert Frank’s pivotal 1950s photographs as its starting point. Charting the medium’s trajectory through a variety of genres and practices, Gefter postulates that photography post-Frank has created a paradox: While the photographic image has brought us to a heightened awareness of the world around us, the constant representation of who we are has conspired against our natural state of innocence. Gefter begins with Robert Frank’s challenge to photography’s formal objectivity with the grainy, off-handed spontaneity of The Americans. Next ... -
The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events, with the hope—and frequently the expectation—that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured, as witnessed by the impact of certain images during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Bending the Frame, by author and critic Fred Ritchin, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media ... -
Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography is the long-awaited collection of essays, reviews, and lectures—some of which have gained a cult following online—by Tod Papageorge, one of the most influential voices in photography today. As the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at Yale University School of Art, Papageorge has shaped the work of generations of artist/photographers, and earned a reputation as an unusually eloquent guide to the work of many important figures in twentieth-century photography. Among the artists Papageorge discusses in this essential volume are Atget, Brassaï, Robert Frank (with Walker Evans), Robert Adams, and his close friend, Garry Winogrand. The ... -
Helen Gee: Limelight, a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties Aperture FoundationIn the late 1950s, the Limelight gallery and coffeehouse was the intellectual hangout of Greenwich Village, if not New York. It drew patrons and critics with ten shows per year, featuring the work of such figures as Minor White, Arnold Newman, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Brassaï, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Robert Frank. When Limelight opened in 1954, it was the first commercial gallery in the US devoted exclusively to photography; along with the Museum of Modern Art, it became the most important venue for serious photography in the city. Helen Gee: Limelight, a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in ... -
The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of photography’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 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 Eugéne Atget to Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Susan Lipper, and Paul Graham. Among the broader topics discussed are the photobook—where Badger believes ...
