Aperture

Founded in 1952, Aperture is an essential guide to the world of contemporary photography that combines the finest writing with inspiring photographic portfolios. Each issue examines one theme explored in “Words,” focused on the best writing surrounding contemporary photography, and “Pictures,” featuring immersive portfolios and artist projects.

Aperture

Contributors

Exhibitions to See

Redux • While playing bass for Hole, Melissa Auf der Maur created a searing record of life on tour in an offline world.

Backstory • Jason Fulford’s fanny pack doubles as a roving gallery of photography and conceptual art.

Gag Photography • There’s a dark humor in photographically relieving heads from their bodies, one that seems to get at the uncanny aspects of the medium itself. Over the past century, artists have drawn from Hollywood slapstick and vernacular photography to produce gags as a way to express hard things in hard times. It’s a lineage that—through collage, stagecraft, and other sleights of hand—mingles art and entertainment, punctum and punch line, gimmickry and avant-garde agitation. Both noun and verb, gag provokes strong feelings, catching us in the throat where we’re most vulnerable.

Notebook • Walker Evans revealed how truth often resides beneath the surface of the mundane.

Martine Gutierrez • Martine Gutierrez’s art spans photography, music, performance, auteur television, bus shelters, and billboards, but her true medium is herself. Since vaulting to prominence with her 2018 magazine-cum-artist-book Indigenous Woman, the maximalist hyphenate has adopted dozens of personae—from supermodel to siren—to inhabit slippery questions around gender, indigeneity, and desire. This past August, she performed a new work with Julio Torres as part of the 2026 Whitney Biennial.

Portfolio • After retracing his parents’ steps in South Central, Carlos Jaramillo found his own calling.

STOP TIME

Hiroshi Sugimoto Through the Looking Glass • A Conversation with Michael Famighetti

Second Nature • Hiroshi Sugimoto spent half a century photographing the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. Did he find what he was looking for?

Slice of Life • Before it was codified and given a name, photography existed as a precarious race to interrupt the flow of time itself.

Object Lessons • Since his early days as an antiques dealer, Hiroshi Sugimoto has amassed a Wunderkammer of beguiling objects from across millennia.

Higher Ground • Constructed along Japan’s coastline, Enoura Observatory is a monumental work of land art aligned with the rhythms of the universe. But it’s not meant to last.

In a Darkened Room • Since antiquity, camera obscuras have transformed perception into waking dreams.

Man Ray Model Equations

Time Machines • Photographers’ attempts to freeze time have produced a world visibly in flux, where the present is unfixed and in-between.

Light Years • Newton’s discoveries in optics revealed a world of light no longer confined to black and white, but teeming with color and infinite questions.

Idol Talk • Petra Collins’s latest book examines the allure and volatility of pop-star fandom.

Lights, Camera, Print • A new wave of books is blurring the line between photography and cinema.

Screen Time • Vilém Flusser famously predicted the end of writing. Are we watching it happen?

Reviews

Endnote • With his TV show How To with John Wilson, the verité filmmaker John Wilson cemented his status as New York’s laureate of eccentricity—his tutorials about scaf-folding, small talk, and parking invariably veer to mind-boggling rabbit holes and esoteric subcultures. In his debut feature, The History of Concrete, Wilson attempts to make the...