Sommaire pour Summer 2023 de Aperture

A young woman sits on a plastic-covered bed in a cheap motel room. She is dressed without pageantry or occasion, in a black tank top and a pair of shorts. A small tattoo is visible on the inside of her elbow. She is barefoot. Her gaze is one of neither confrontation nor seduction. “See me as I am,” she seems to be saying. “Look at me as I look at you.” Behind her, a poster depicting a flat, computer-rendered landscape of a beach is tacked to the wall. This could be Vietnam, but it could also be anywhere tropical. What does it mean to grow up in a country violently marked by colonization and war? For Vân-Nhi Nguyen, the twenty-three-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the untitled image as part of…

An-My Lê and Pao Houa Her are two photographers addressing fiction and truth in war and its aftermath, and the marks—or lack of them—left by migrant and refugee communities on the American landscape. Lê’s series Small Wars (1999–2002) restages scenes from the Vietnam War with reenactors, creating images that, at first, seem to offer journalistic evidence, but on examination open a strange conversation about that war and its memorialization. Her’s series Attention (2015) shows Hmong veterans in military regalia, and if they look a little showy that might be because the regalia was purchased online or given to each for their service in the Secret War in Laos—a community honoring itself for contributions the US government refuses to recognize. More recently, Lê’s series Silent General (2015–ongoing) visits farms in California,…

It almost feels like too much. You can practically hear the gaudy crystalline beads dripping from the ceiling and smell the heady jasmine scent from the floral arrangements. Their slightly stilted expressions, eyes often looking directly into the camera, offer a sharp contrast to their elegant gestures. Some of the poses appear to be plucked from a Busby Berkeley dance sequence, or riff on the vernacular of wedding photos. These scenes of riotous congregation are from Parting Gift (2022–ongoing), a series of Leonard Suryajaya’s signature tableaux, which lovingly render the strangeness of ordinary people and everyday life. The Indonesian-born, Chicago-based artist regularly conscripts family and friends as subjects for his highly stylized constructions. For Perennial Blossom (2022), the artist enlisted student collaborators to serve as a multiracial chorus that frames…

Over the course of researching a project meant to be a fictional addendum to early popular photography of the mid-nineteenth century, Bruce Yonemoto learned that Chinese men had fought and died in the American Civil War. This discovery surrounds a series of portraits, North South East West (2007), depicting Asian men uniformed as Northern and Southern troops wielding period-style weapons, set amid portrait-studio standards: a balustrade, a velvet curtain, a vividly patterned floor. Having spent years around video and film production, Yonemoto was able to access one of Hollywood’s oldest wardrobe-supply houses, Western Costume, whose collection includes costumes used in Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 pro-Confederacy film. In North South East West, Yonemoto connects Griffith’s evocation of the Ku Klux Klan…

A panel of solid black is interrupted by fragments of human form: an elderly woman stepping halfway into the frame, her expression animated by something in the dark. Down by her side, a sliver of a child’s face peeks out with one curious eye. In front of them, a floral-patterned bandana levitates in midair, as though to suggest the presence of some phantom we can’t see. In Passing, taken in 1969 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, reflects the intuitive gaze of a longtime local. It is a mode of looking that is at once attuned to the intricate sociality of one’s own community and unconcerned with accommodating the needs of an outside viewer, registering instead rich stretches of ordinary life as darkness. The artist, Irene Poon, spent many years photographing the…

Context is rarely tidy. Even as it clarifies, it confounds. Consider this: in 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers on the night of his bachelor party. In the aftermath, he became an enduring icon of the Asian American civil rights movement. Thirty years after Chin’s murder, the photographer Jarod Lew discovered that his mother had been the one engaged to him. If this is context, I wondered, viewing Lew’s family portraits in his series In Between You and Your Shadow (2021–ongoing), what to do with it? In one photograph, Lew’s mother hides her face behind a bouquet of bright spring flowers. In another, two vacant chairs sit against the wall of his aunt’s Chinese restaurant in Metro Detroit. I admit I tried to make such…

Not long ago, Daido Moriyama told me that his favorite way of encountering photographs is in a book or magazine. Nobuyoshi Araki has emphasized that “the photobook—not too big—is still the best way to show photographs.” And Tomoko Sawada has proclaimed that her photobooks are “works of art in their own right.” Indeed, many Japanese photographers understand books, as well as magazine features, as the ideal means of presenting their artistic output, often putting them on par with framed photographs on a wall. The importance of the printed page to Japanese photography cannot be overemphasized. Over the last twenty years, images by a growing number of Japanese photographers have been shown in exhibitions worldwide. Simultaneously, the international photography community has begun to accept the photobook as a valid form of…

One of my oldest memories is of my sister Patrícia’s birthday party. It was the early 1980s, and we were all dressed up around a table with a big cake decorated with colorful whipped cream. Festooned with balloons, the small house was packed with people. It was incredible; it seemed like another world, another life, another potential way of living. More than forty years later, I returned to that smell of new clothes and the brightness of that day when I saw a photograph of a child’s sixth birthday party taken in 1988 by Afonso Pimenta. The cake, the simple home, the big bottles of soda, the many Black folk, the few white folk—it’s all there, just like it was at Pat’s party. “A photo narrates the finest moment in…

In the mid-1980s, soon after graduating with an MA in photography from the Royal College of Art, Sunil Gupta wrote in the pages of the British photography quarterly Ten.8: “It’s time we reconstructed images of desire by ourselves and for ourselves.” Gupta has made sensitive portraits about homosexuality in Indian cities and advocated for more equitable representation in UK art spaces, pushing postcolonial resistance throughout a career spanning life in Delhi, New York, and London. His writing, recently collected in We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference (Aperture, 2022), is fierce in its political commitments while attuned to the value of community and togetherness—a range of vision that dwells on the life-altering potential of desire. Reflections of the Black Experience I came to London in the early 1970s fully…

In Gina Osterloh’s photographs, there are subjects but no faces. Bodies are pitched at sly angles or obscured by sundry materials, boxed into sparse rooms with impossible vanishing points. These abstract scenes and their solitary figures are usually staged more as tableaux than conventional portraiture, but even to wonder at which point the former arrangement becomes the latter is to ask: Where, in this image, does the subject end and the world begin? If visual abstraction is about flirting with the limits of recognition, testing our ability to name what we see, in Osterloh’s work it becomes a way of questioning how we parse identity at such thresholds of perception. Her interest in what she has called “the flickering between legibility and illegibility” is informed by her experience as a…

Arthur Ou initially planned to become an engineer. Two years into his studies, he decided he wanted to be a photographer and moved across the United States, from California to New York. Still, he sees the two fields—the histories of technology and of photography—as being deeply intertwined. The camera as a device that enables and enhances our vision continues to fascinate the Taiwanese American artist. Currently, he teaches a course that explores the relationship between image making and science at Parsons School of Design, where he is an associate professor of photography. Ou’s latest project, Viewfinder (2020–ongoing), considers the act of seeing the world as a precursor to understanding our place within it. He depicts this experience vicariously through his subjects, who are between five and seven years old—an age…

In the 1970s Reagan Louie moved to San Francisco to take a teaching job. The city still had a countercultural flair, and Louie, who at the time considered himself something of a rebel, began documenting the streets and vibrant businesses of its Chinatown. He later traveled to China, connecting to his family’s history and capturing the country’s rapid pace of change. By now, he has spent more than fifty years exploring issues of migration, cultural transformation, and intergenerational dialogue through photography. As the son of immigrant parents, Louie’s decision to take an art path was a bold one. He studied with such major figures as Robert Heinecken and Walker Evans, and considers Chauncey Hare, the photographer-activist who famously abandoned the art world to focus on the plight of workers, a…

Guido Guidi’s studio is located on the ground floor of his countryside house on the outskirts of Cesena, Italy. This is just a few kilometers from the coast of the Adriatic Sea, a half-hour drive from the early Christian mosaics of Ravenna, ancient capital of the Western Roman Empire, and the dreamy atmospheres of Rimini, where Federico Fellini’s Amarcord is set. To reach Guidi’s old building, you follow a dirt road between two long rows of persimmon trees. It is mid-December, and the ripe fruit, full and orange, warms the winter palette. It feels like being inside one of the pictures for which Guidi is famous: a nowhere place, marginal, aesthetically unremarkable. Ruined walls, abandoned tools, vegetation growing wild. What first comes to mind are the photographs in Per Strada…

In the summer of 1953, Charles Wong’s photo-essay “1952/The Year of the Dragon” was published in the fifth issue of Aperture. The impetus for Wong’s piece—a carefully designed sequence of photography and poetry—was an extortion scheme that had plagued the immigrant community in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The perpetrators peppered vulnerable immigrants with fake notices about kidnapped family members in China. Cut off from communication by the Communist Revolution, many of the scheme’s victims opted to pay an expensive ransom, while others made the difficult decision to forsake their loved ones to imagined captors. The themes of Wong’s work—immigrant displacement, vulnerability, memory, and intergenerational trauma—reveal wounds of the Asian American immigrant experience that feel no less raw today. Wong’s piece might be read as a statement about the impossible choices and…

Photographic archives are repositories of possibility. For myself, they are a store of images that appear to narrate, in ways unmatched by any other historical record, the trajectories of my own family’s migration from Kerala to Bombay to Tokyo, and later my immigration from Japan to the United States. For immigrants of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent in the United States, archives are where we turn to see ourselves reflected and preserved in the historical record. But what we often find in public archives are images that render us as strangers, or as spectacles on display. We see objects to be gawked at, our dark faces obscured in portraits where immigrants are identified by turbans, topis, braids, and kimonos. By contrast, the family photo-album operates as a kind of…

The week after Trump won the presidential election, I attended an Asian American community meeting in Manhattan where one of the attendees told me the following story. The day after the election, he ran into a senior partner at his work, jubilant about the results. Now, the older man said, we can finally round up the gays, the Muslims, and the immigrants. Shocked by this brazen declaration, my new acquaintance pointed out that he was gay himself, and the children of immigrants. When he returned to his office, he saw an email. It was not an apology. The partner wrote that Korematsu v. United States—the 1944 Supreme Court decision justifying the Japanese American prison camps—was still good law. This senior partner wasn’t alone. I remember waiting for a flight at…

In the 1980s, Tseng Kwong Chi made a name for himself in New York’s downtown circuit with his distinctive Mao suit. He lived a form of performance, embodied the role of a Chinese dignitary—and turned his nocturnal life into art. On an early 1980s episode of a Manhattan public-access television show, a slim man wearing sunglasses and a Mao suit walks onto the screen. He is about to treat viewers to a performance. “This is Kwong Chi, ladies and gentlemen,” says Kestutis Nakas, a Lithuanian American theater artist and the host of the program. “He’s been doing this kind of thing all over town.” Tseng Kwong Chi holds a cable release for a camera in his hand. The two shuffle into place, preparing to have their picture taken. The broadcast…

When she was four or five years old, Priya Suresh Kambli watched her mother cut out her own face from family photographs. Kambli’s mother left the pictures of her daughters, Priya and her elder sister, Sona, intact. This act of simultaneous erasure and preservation fascinated Kambli. Decades later, she brings the same dialectic into play when creating her own artworks drawn from family photo-albums. Kambli was born in 1975, in the Indian city of Mumbai, then called Bombay, and came to the United States at the age of eighteen. A few years earlier, Kambli’s mother had died from cancer, and just six months later, her father had suffered a fatal heart attack. In the period that followed, Kambli was adrift. One of her aunts, a pediatrician in Louisiana, sponsored Kambli’s…