In the waning decades of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, Prague’s T-Club was an open secret. The clandestine gay nightclub had claimed its own gravitational force, tucked into a basement behind Wenceslas Square, where much of the drama of the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent “normalization” period were playing out. It was an anxious time, and the country was quickly sliding back into autocratic rule; there were widespread crackdowns on pro-democracy reformists and state eyes were everywhere. For patrons who were marginalized by the sitting regime for their sexuality and politics, T-Cl ..read more

Robert Adams, New Housing, Reche Canyon, San Bernardino County, California, 1983 American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams (2021) For fifty years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. Photographing what Adams calls “the silence of light” of the American West, his images capture the sense of peace and harmony that nature can instill in us while questioning the desecration of that beauty by consumerism, industrializat ..read more

To get to Herbert Art Gallery from Coventry station, you must follow a series of pedestrian tunnels under an overpass toward the old city center, which was razed by the German Luftwaffe. What bombs didn’t flatten, postwar developers buried, sinking much of Coventry—like so many other towns in the Midlands—in a tangle of highways and footpaths incongruous with pedestrian habit. This was back in the 1950s, when the UK actually had a social welfare policy; even then, master-planning politicians and architects preferred to regard working-class life from an aerial view.  Rob Clayton, Lin, Care ..read more

Aperture’s support of emerging photographers and other lens-based artists is a vital part of our mission. The annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography—identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition.  Aperture’s editors reviewed an outstanding number of submissions, and we are thrilled to announce the shortlisted artists for the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize:  River Claure  Janna Ireland  Abhishek Khedekar  Avion Pearce  Laila Stevens  These ..read more

When the People’s War began in Nepal, in 1996, eight-year-old Prasiit Sthapit noticed that his great-grandfather’s portrait had suddenly disappeared from the living-room wall. Later, as an adult, he realized that the picture of the mustachioed man he had assumed to be his great-grandfather was, in fact, a framed poster of Joseph Stalin. Sthapit’s grandfather, an ardent Communist, looked up to Stalin. In the decade-long, violent armed conflict between the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN-Maoist) and the state, anyone left-leaning was seen as a Maoist sympathizer, and many were arrested or, worse ..read more

On the day the world shut down, Miranda July received a strange phone call. It was Friday, March 13, 2020, and July was on her way to a café when she learned that her child’s school was going to close “indefinitely.” As she waited for a friend, stunned by the news that the pandemic scare was all too real, a telemarketer from the Philippines called with an offer for “services,” which July learned were related to promotional strategies for self-published authors. An artist and filmmaker whose breakout indie film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), retains an enduring fanbase, July ..read more

It is 1994 in Tokyo and Mariko Mori is angry. She has just come out of a business meeting, and is appalled to find that intelligent women, with degrees from leading universities, are being made to serve tea while working at the office. She has recently returned from five years overseas, studying art in London at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, followed by two years in New York at the Whitney Museum’s rigorous Independent Study Program. “I was exposed to seeing the position of women in the West,” she recalled in a recent conversation with me, speaking from her home in New York. “I was sh ..read more

The British documentary photographer Martin Parr has long chronicled how people experience leisure and pleasure by interacting with the trappings of consumerism. His depictions of shoppers in Laura Ashley, tourists in beach cafes, and Tupperware parties scrutinized late twentieth-century British life in new ways. His more recent, cropped-in, color-saturated pictures are graphic commentaries on the glorious and hollow nature of manufactured delights. Sometimes, they are discreet commissions by fashion magazines and fashion brands. The Martin Parr Foundation, an exhibition space, library, and ar ..read more

As a high school student in Puerto Rico, around 2005, Christopher Gregory-Rivera grew active in student movements that fought university tuition hikes. His mother wasn’t happy about it. “She would say, ‘Cuidado, te van a carpetear,’ which meant that the police were going to open a file on me,” Gregory-Rivera told me recently. “That was my first exposure to the idea that the police were opening files, or carpetas, on dissidents. I was like, ‘Mom’s crazy, she’s paranoid,’ but it turned out to be something that’s super present in Puerto Rican protest culture and the Puerto Rican imaginary in gene ..read more

The work of French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, lies somewhere between memoir and sociological study, with books like The Years (2008) documenting what reviewers have coined “collective memory”: her personal experiences turned universal. In her highly visual prose, Ernaux often presents fragments of memories through descriptions of photographs, artifacts of a past life she describes in precise detail, down to the patina of the print. Though her medium is the written word, could she be described as an image-maker herself? This idea was explored by t ..read more