Vince Aletti
Everyone has a drawer. That place where you keep things which, as Molière reportedly once put it, are “good enough to lock away.” Whether in a bureau or on a hard drive, the drawer has a system of organization that cannot be explained. For, while its contents may not be secret, it is yours alone to open.
Vince Aletti’s drawer is full of images. The legendary curator and critic of photography has been a collector of printed matter his entire adult life. Books pile high atop the chairs and along the walls of the East Village apartment where he has lived for forty years; the looser materials have mostly ended up in drawers. In 2020, an old-fashioned wooden cabinet became the focus of Aletti’s pandemic-lockdown tidying, and in particular a drawer of pictures cut from magazines and newspapers, as well as exhibition announcements, party flyers, and snapshots purchased from flea markets and estate sales. You could think of it as a pre-Pinterest mood board, were it governed by anything as simple as an algorithm—but the selections of Aletti’s gimlet eye are much more complex, and much less homogenous, than that. They offer us a master class in close looking.
The Drawer (SPBH Editions, 2022; 144 pages, £45) features seventy-three photographs of Aletti’s ephemera, in selections he arranged himself. Printed at 11 by 15 inches, the book is nearly as large as the drawer itself, with photographed items reproduced at full-scale, providing a kind of access none of us are likely to otherwise have. Published without accompanying text, the images are a kind of Rorschach test for the critic’s mind—just don’t try too hard to make sense of them.
Formal resonances abound. (1770) mimics the form of a speckled tulip in a Dutch still life. A Tom of Finland drawing of two men fellating each other resembles a pair of linebackers in a mutual embrace. Some seem like overt witticisms: a flyer for the New York gay bar the Cock, for instance, tucked above a photograph of Constantin Brancusi’s golden phallus, (1928); a young man with glistening white cum on his face, from an announcement for a Ryan McGinley exhibition, opposite a photograph of the gay icon W. H. Auden dappled with falling snow; the May 2007 cover of , with Marina Apollonio’s kinetic, black-and-white spiral (1968), below the hypnotic photograph, featured in Monica Majoli’s 2019 Galerie Buchholz exhibition, of a nude young man exposing his dark, round hole.
