Aperture

Gauri Gill’s series Acts of Appearance (2015–ongoing) shows subjects bedecked in papiermâché masks with depictions as varied as the head of an elephant, the face of the moon, or the screen of a television. While traveling through Rajasthan and Mahara

Roe Ethridge says his first loves were Lee Friedlander and Andy Warhol. “I’m a photographer, but I’m also an editor,” he has noted. “I’m a colorist. I’m a pictorialist. I’m a commercial photographer.” Ethridge’s images are irreverent amalgams of reci

Question: What is spirituality? Krishnamurti: I say it is harmonious living. Now wait a minute. I will explain to you what I mean. You cannot live harmoniously if you are a nationalist. How can you? If you are race-conscious, or class-conscious, how

“At this time I feel a strong need for the affirmation of spirit in photography in published form,” Minor White wrote to a colleague in 1966. “Aperture is the only place it can possibly be published at this time. Too bad for photography but that is t

“Here is definitely a young photographer to watch,” pronounced a glowing profile of Tosh Matsumoto in the April 1947 issue of Popular Photography. For the next decade, Matsumoto’s work would appear in magazines and newspapers, and be presented in six

How should we live if life is finite? What is our responsibility to our families, our communities, and our environment? How can we practice a secular faith beyond the constraints of institutionalized religion? In his latest book, This Life: Secular F

In the summer of 1970, in Aperture, Minor White published “an experiment in fiction” called “The Tale of Peter Rasun Gould,” a series of brief vignettes recounting the narrator’s encounters with the seer-like titular character. Part reminiscence, par

If the spiritual, even loosely defined, is a realm beyond the actual, then photography’s relation to it is bound to be complicated. Picturing the spiritual must either go through the actual, or somehow slip around it. In this sense, photography is, l

Modernism and photography developed alongside, and in relation to, each other. But at its mid-nineteenth-century start, the field of photography split, one side documenting so-called reality, courting humanism, emphasizing the centrality of human bei

“A smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity” is how the New York Times described the first-ever image of a black hole, released last April. A staple more of science fiction than of reality, these bizarre objects have a gravitational force that

This is the British DJ Danny Rampling talking about the atmosphere in the early days of his nightclub Shoom, in 1988 London, at the start of the acid-house explosion that sent shock waves through U.K. youth culture, and eventually worldwide: “It was

Like all documentation work, protest photography has its habits. One default setting is confrontation. Bare hands linked in a human chain parallel to riot shields. Projectiles. The pregnancy of violence. Another, related, is heroism, frequently indiv

7/15 In Feelings Are Facts, the dancer-choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s memoir, she describes an incident that’s always stuck with me. In 1971, during a blue-black period, she tried to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills alongside a slice of ba

Mare Nero is a publishing platform created by two Italian artists based in Berlin, Federico Gargaglione, a photographer, and Nicola Fucili, an illustrator and tattoo artist. When the two met in Poland, in 2017, they had an immediate connection. The n

In October 2004, a few months after a handful of his black-and-white street photographs were presented in an exhibition of South African photography in Tokyo, Santu Mofokeng agreed to meet me at his Johannesburg home. The plan was to pick up on our c

In the contemporary Thai art world, self-censorship is the norm. With strict lèse-majesté laws and watchful military rule since 2014, artists and curators have become adept at skirting around politically sensitive issues in order to slip under the ra

On August 12, 1962, the song leader Henry Thomas led a protest meeting at St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina, but his performance with a sextet, called the Freedom-tones, didn’t seem to be getting much traction.