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
Agenda • Exhibitions to See
Backstory • Tina Barney revisits rarely seen films and classic photographs of family and affluence.
Redux • After languishing in boxes for decades, Steven Cuffie’s images of Black life in Baltimore finally get their due.
Viewfinder • A new volume unpacking seven decades of protest highlights how student activists have organized through print culture.
Timeline • Flash in America
Studio Visit • In an antique farmhouse in the Netherlands, Ruth van Beek assembles new worlds from a vast archive of collected imagery.
Curriculum
Image Worlds to Come Photography & AI
Trevor Paglen Ways of Seeing • A Conversation with Sarah M. Miller
Minne Atairu Model Studies • The artist and researcher investigates how synthetic images render hair, beauty, and Blackness.
Generative Style • The Farm Security photographs revealed enduring stories of American life. As a dataset, what can they tell us about artificial intelligence?
Kate Crawford Metabolic Images • A Conversation with Paola Antonelli
Ghosts in the Machine • Is generative AI simply a tool in service of an artist’s vision, or is it the creator? Inside the bizarre realm of AI copyright law.
Deep Reals • What is realism in the age of artificial intelligence?
Fred Ritchin The Simulated Camera • A Conversation with Brian Palmer
Creation Myths • To unlock art’s potential in an algorithmically scripted world, we need a new language for understanding how AI images operate.
Charlie Engman Cursed Images
The PhotoBook Review
The Art of the Book
Smaller Pleasures • Is the age of oversized photobooks over?
Rosalind Fox Solomon Self-Portraits in Time
Reviews
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