In 1975, I reached a kind of dead end in my photography. I had been photographing in black and white, then my chosen medium, taking pictures of the American social landscape in New England and around New York—desolate parking lots inhabited by elusive human figures, lost-looking children strapped in car seats, and dogs slouching by on the street. The photographs were a little alienated, sometimes ironic, occasionally amusing, perhaps a bit surreal, and emotionally detached. Somehow I sensed that the work wasn’t taking me anywhere new. I seemed to be exploring territory that other photographers ..read more

Architecture and photography have always been intimately connected. These media share a few fundamentals: impacts of light and air, the balance of surface and depth, interiority and exteriority, and how these relations are mediated by the human body. Attending to such concerns has guided the expansive, fluid artistic practice of Dayanita Singh, whose open-ended approach to the photographic image has led to distinctive architectural modes of display. Encased in teak frames, screens, and boxes that often double as display cases which can be placed on walls and bookshelves, Singh’s photographs ci ..read more

Photography and death are tied, inextricably, in a knot. Art historians, critics, poets, and theorists have covered this extensively: Post-mortem photography began alongside the medium’s invention. The American Civil War is recalled primarily through photographs of dead or dying soldiers and civilians. Even fake death, as in Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840), attests to its presence in photography.  Roland Barthes wrote that a photograph is “the living image of a dead thing.” Susan Sontag said that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” Bu ..read more

Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion claims an entire wall at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a floor-to-ceiling sweep of images gathered and created in partnership with the health care workers it honors. Composed of nearly 2,500 individual photographs, each capturing the daily routines of abortion care workers, The Last Safe Abortion is a monumental homage to feminist health care. Striking in scale and precise in its ordering of each 4-by-6 color print, The Last Safe Abortion compels viewers to move closer and walk alongside it to absorb the smallest elements of the ..read more

In 1980, the photographer Stephen A. Scheer received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to complete his series The Maples, which was originally published in Aperture’s summer 1983 issue, and subsequently collected in a monograph published by Blue Sky Books in 2016. Here, we look back at Scheer’s portfolio in the magazine. These photographs were made during the summer of 1979 in a small residential community outside Shelton, Connecticut. The name of the community is The Maples, and it covers a stretch of land about one mile long on the banks of the Housatonic River. The residents have ..read more

Early in the BBC documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (2023), a powerful collection of personal testimonies on the Troubles, one speaker recalls his childhood excitement during the first waves of civil unrest. “It was mad . . . it was like a movie,” he reminisces, thinking back on the innocent elation he experienced as mass protests, running street battles, and military patrols became regular features of everyday life. Inevitably, as the daily drama intensified, with bombings, shootings, and funerals dominating the headlines, the desperate gravity of the situation became cle ..read more

Danny Lyon has a story to tell—many stories, in fact. The photographer who captured a young John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other moments of the early civil rights era is known for embedding himself in communities and documenting scenes with historic import and cultural specificity, including a 1960s Texas prison, a downtown New York demolition, and the Vietnam War protests. Perhaps most famously of all, Lyon photographed the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, joining the group to document it from the inside. But to say this was simply the s ..read more

In the late 1970s Tokuko Ushioda lived in a modest fifteen-tatami-mat apartment with her husband and their newborn daughter. They lived sparingly. A couch doubled as a guest bed; the kitchen consisted of a table in the corner; they shared a downstairs bathroom with the building’s other residents. One day, her husband arrived home with an old Swedish refrigerator that Ushioda described to be as large as a polar bear. The hulking appliance, much too big for their space, malfunctioned from the beginning. It froze vegetables solid and at night rattled like a poltergeist, stirring anxiety and fear ..read more

It was during the last Carnival, where Tadáskía said she had truly abandoned herself to the revelry for the first time, that she was bitten on her leg by a lacraia—what certain Brazilian regions call a centipede with a long body, a flat back, and numerous pairs of legs. They may or may not be poisonous.  I wasn’t familiar with the word lacraia before hearing this story, but I was struck by how it had become key to helping me describe Tadáskía’s practice. Tadáskía is an artist based between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the southeast of Brazil. I have been engaged in a num ..read more

Nick Mauss and Angela Miller’s book Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (2023) brings new critical discourse to representations of queerness in American modernism. Part of a series called “Defining Moments in Photography,” the book contains two richly illustrated essays with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee. Mauss appraises the wide-ranging practice of George Platt Lynes, a photographer who is known (if at all) primarily for his male nudes from the 1930s and ’40s. Miller writes about the collaborative photographs of Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Marga ..read more