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.

FRÆNKEL

Aperture

Contributors

Agenda • Exhibitions to See

Backstory • Mimi Plumb’s prescient images anticipate social strife and environmental emergency in the United States.

Viewfinder • Karim Kal creates nocturnes that suspend Algerian history in unyielding mystery.

Studio Visit • From a studio on South Africa’s Cape Peninsula, Jo Ractliffe prepares for an exhibition of her haunting work.

Curriculum • Philip Montgomery personifies grace under pressure, whether documenting the lives of people in opioidravaged towns, pandemic-besieged hospitals, flood zones, or at the barricade. His images, which appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine and are the subject of a survey exhibition this season at Germanyʼs Deichtorhallen Hamburg, are collected in Philip Montgomery: American Mirror (Aperture, 2021), which established the New York–based photographer as a leading chronicler of our disorienting times.

EDITORS’ NOTE • The Craft Issue

Theaster Gates The Polemics of Craft • A Conversation with Ekow Eshun

Looking Glass

Things as They Are • Over her thirty-year career, the Korean-born artist Jungjin Lee has used her camera to turn objects and barren landscapes into absorbing sites of contemplation.

Hands to Heavens

The Depth of a Pocket • Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran in Conversation with Alistair O’Neill

A Vision of Her Own • Lucia Moholy’s photographs helped define the visual identity of the Bauhaus. Why was she left out of its history?

Stitches in Time • Working with photographs, scraps of cloth, and polyester thread, Montes Michie makes narrative tapestries that explore queer intimacy and memory.

Zen and the Art of Photography • Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz in Conversation with Michael Famighetti

Hybrids

Treasure Island

The PhotoBook Review

Ideas of Africa • Oluremi C. Onabanjo speaks with Brendan Embser about how books chart histories of photography on the continent.

Turn-On • A new Manhattan bookshop, decked out in stainless steel and latex, offers a novel experience.

Good Vibrations • Mark Borthwick’s new tome is a diaristic document of a photographer discovering his vision, frame by frame.

Reviews

Endnote • Edmund de Waal pieces together how objects and histories are handed on, lost, or scattered across space and time. The British potter and writer is best known for The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), a runaway bestseller that traces his family’s lineage through an inherited collection of Japanese netsuke figurines. His most recent book, an Archive (2025), compiles a decade of writing on the nature of collecting and remembrance.