In this issue, we bring you a wide spectrum of voices and visions—from Morocco-born Lalla Essaydi, whose images metaphorically explore the essence of Muslim womanhood; from Argentina, with Gaby Messina’s portraits of “Grandes Mujeres”;
Guy Bourdin: Fashions recomposed in brilliant, saturated color. Exquisitely calibrated compositions. Icy titillation. Murder, suicide, accidental death. Unresolved dramas with no plausible second act. Models upstaged by poles, by images within the image, by the frame.
It was a tremendous struggle to see this first-ever U.S. retrospective of Shomei Tomatsu’s photographs—a struggle because, in order to really see this work, it is necessary to banish the single overarching preoccupation of all its images: Japan.
Through a career of more than forty years, Magnum photographer Raymond Depardon’s images have punctuated our common history: from his early shots of jumping and running athletes to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to the quiet photographs of Tibesti warriors trekking at dawn in the sand dunes.
Re-Inventing the Spaces Within: The Images of Lalla Essaydi
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Isolde Brielmaier
I am writing. I am writing on me, I am writing on her. The story began to be written the moment the present began. I am asking, how can i be simultaneously inside and outside? I didn’t even know this world existed, I thought it existed only in my head, in my dreams.
A thin line wends its way through an undulating sea of green, like the trail of a parasite burrowing into the bark of a tree. The analogy is an apt one: what we are looking at is a photograph of a rainforest in the southeast of Cameroon, and the line, a dirt road, represents the trail of destruction wrought by illegal logging in one of the world’s few remaining pristine forests.
A Procession of Them: The Plight of the Mentally Disabled
Hidalgo, Mexico, October 1999
Kapan, Armenia, May 2000
Asunción, Paraguay, September 2003
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EUGENE RICHARDS
It was 6:30 and so dark that all I could see of the attendant who unlocked the door were his hands. There were nine of us sneaking into Ocaranza that morning—humanrights lawyers, a doctor, social workers, newsmen, and the activist who led us there.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s most recent series of photographs, “Conceptual Forms,” is based on a collection of nineteenth-century scientific objects housed in the museum of the University of Tokyo. His series consists of forty-four large-format black-and-white photographs, which can be divided into two nearly equal groups, “Mathematical Forms” and “Mechanical Forms.”
Culture in Context: Photographs in Vince Aletti's Magazine Collection
PHOTOGRAPHS IN VINCE ALETTI'S MAGAZINE COLLECTION
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PHILIP GEFTER
Look, January 9, 1968: cover photograph by Richard Avedon; art director for issue: Allen Hurlburt. L’Uomo Vogue, May-June 1995:cover photograph by Steven Meisel; art director for issue: Alejandro González. Portfolio, Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1950: cover, layout, and typography by art director Alexey Brodovitch.
Grandes Mujeres—the title of Argentinean photographer Gaby Messina’s project translates literally as “grand women.” But really, her subjects are far more than that. English-speakers have to borrow from the French when describing such women.
Mike Smith moved as a “Yankee” to the hills of Southern Appalachia in 1981, bringing a foreign mind to the habits of his neighbors and to the surrounding landscapes. There is of course much good in being an outsider, particularly for a photographer.
While some years ago St. Petersburg was marked by decline and transition, today the city emanates once more metropolitan splendour. In the city's historical centre newly renovated churches, palaces, and museums rub Shoulders with high street shops.
For Shafran, photography is, in a very literal sense, a "way of life"; it is a constructive process, part of the building and preserving that we all go through. It is a photography which signals an acceptance of and growing respect for the things that we acquire and that settle around us; an acknowledgement of all the effort and investment they represent and an awareness that, in their changing patterns and own material ageing, they embody the passing of time.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist
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Where had Lartigue come from? For John Szarkowski, curator of the [1963] MoMA exhibition, Lartigue was a "true primitive," a photographer raised in the wilderness of amateur photography as it had been practiced a half century earlier.
Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685). 1. Title of publication: Aperture; 2. Publication no.: 0003-6420; 3. Date of filing: September 30, 2004; 4. Frequency of issue: Quarterly; 5. No. of issues published annually: 4;
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