Reading Time: 3 minutes Driven by a desire to “do everything differently”, in 2017 Davis dropped his ongoing projects and spent two years travelling to Los Angeles, resulting in an expansive monograph published by Aperture
Tag: Aperture
Reading Time: 5 minutes “It was painful to go back because I didn’t process what happened the first time”
Reading Time: 4 minutes With entries from Roe Ethridge, Jim Goldberg, Rinko Kawauchi, and 200 others, Photo No-Nos explores how not to make a good image
Reading Time: 6 minutes The Canadian photographer observes her own life to explore the commodification of our personal data and way of being
Reading Time: 6 minutes The American photographer whose work tackles subjects affecting himself and others discusses his ever-evolving, multi-layered practice
Reading Time: 3 minutes This month, editor, publisher, and executive director at Aperture Foundation Chris Boot reflects on his life and career
Reading Time: 3 minutes The South African photographer’s series of self-portraits addressing race, gender, and identity has been awarded the prestigious photobook prize
Reading Time: 2 minutes Arnis Balcus, photographer, editor in chief of FK Magazine and director of Riga Photomonth, picks out the projects that caught his eye, including Georgs Avetisjans’ Homeland The Longest Village
Reading Time: 6 minutes When William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered the salted paper and calotype processes in 1841, he soon turned his new inventions to food, capturing two baskets overflowing with fruit. Creating an image designed to mimic the paintings of the time, and to contrast the colours and textures of the pineapple and peaches, he also made an image rife with welcoming symbolism – the pineapple a sign of hospitality, the peach a sign of fecundity.
“Fox Talbot’s photograph was copying the traditions of painting and its attendant symbolism,” says photography curator and writer Susan Bright. “But it was also concerned with the role of photography, and elevating its status to that of art. In this respect it resonates nicely with artists such as Daniel Gordon, whose work also deals with the medium of photography. But his constructed pineapple has nothing to do with symbolism, or striving to be understood as art. It is art. He is questioning the role of visual perception, what is real and what is not.
“The way food is photographed says a tremendous amount about significant aspects of our culture,” Bright continues. “It is often about fantasy, be that national, sexual or historical. Photographs of food are the carrier for so many things – desire, consumption, taste, immigration and feminism, for example. It has been a major part of the development of fine art, editorial, fashion, marketing and product photography throughout the 20th and 21st century.”
Reading Time: 4 minutes Out of nearly 1000 submissions, the winners for this years Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards, established in 2012 to celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the narrative of photography, have been announced at Paris Photo.
The Photobook of the Year award went to Laia Abril, for part one of her long-term project, A History of Misogyny, Chapter One: On Abortion (Dewi Lewis). The project is not about the experience of abortion itself, but about the repercussions for women who do not have access to legal, safe or free abortions, forcing them to consider dangerous alternatives that cause physical and mental harm.