Aperture

Robert Adams For Robert Adams, the American West, with its broad landscapes and temporal stillness, exists as a statement of America, a definitive measure of a nation. His photographs, now collected in American Silence, an expansive exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, distill the vast region into recognizable black-and-white totems—a suburban home, an empty highway, a trodden beach. Before he became a photographer, Adams was an English professor. According to the curator Sarah Greenough, he recognizes “that a perfectly seen photograph, like a perfectly rendered poem, can reveal universal truths hidden in brief instants of time.” Adams keeps his literary sentiments visible in his work, enlightening the mundane scenery of the everyday with lasting significance. Tracey Rose “Reckoning, recompense, and repatriation” — these are the primary themes of Tracey Rose’s work, says…

Untitled (Bodybuilder I) is part of a portrait series made in 2003 and 2004 in which the Romanian photographer Alexandra Croitoru paired herself with a stereotypically masculine companion. In each example, the man is seated and looks away from the camera while Croitoru stands behind him, touching his shoulder and staring into the lens. In this image, she appears with a bodybuilder who trained at her local gym; in another, she is pictured with Adrian Năstase, who served as prime minister of Romania between 2000 and 2004. (Nastase was later tried and imprisoned for corruption.) Croitoru is based in Bucharest, where she studied and now teaches at the National Academy of Arts. In contrast to this kind of overtly staged, performative work, her recent series are more documentary in nature. But…

Sabiha Çimen was twelve when, in 1998, she enrolled at a hafiz okulu (guardian school) in Istanbul. Since 1970 more than 160,000 girls in Turkey, aged eight to nineteen, have studied in these single-sex schools, memorizing the Koran’s 6,236 verses, which takes around three years, and becoming protectors of Islam’s sacred book. Çimen’s upbringing made such a deep impression on her that, a quarter of a century later, these schools became the subject of Hafiz (2021), her first photobook. Intensely intimate, Çimen’s portraits, made between 2017 and 2021, surveil the double lives religious students lead in contemporary Turkey, where it is legal for parents to send children even as young as two years old to study at Koran courses. Çimen belongs to an ethnically Kurdish Persian family. Her older sisters had…

In 1811, when the Commissioners’ Plan established the map that was to dictate Manhattan’s development north of Houston Street, city fathers settled on the gridiron as the ideal form not for its Euclidean elegance but for the sake of rank commerce: “Right angled houses are the most cheap to build,” they declared. Meanwhile, in the city that already existed, streets slouched and coiled like vagabonds, their winding shapes defined by rivers, shorelines, swamps, and large rocks. Among these vintage arteries, Doyers Street, a narrow, two-hundred-foot dogleg angling between the Bowery and Pell Street, is unlike any other. The crime journalist Herbert Asbury, who covered downtown New York, once called it “a crazy street” and said “there has never been any excuse for it.” Turning onto it feels like stumbling into Venice…

Mohamed Bourouissa was still an art student in 2004 when he took his first photographs of young people, mostly his male friends from the banlieues, or suburbs, of Paris. He had wanted to represent their particular sartorial aesthetic. At the time, the Parisian transportation system was laid out such that the easiest way for kids living in different banlieues to meet was to take the direct train to Chatelet–Les Halles in the center of the city. On arrival, their dynamic style—a lot of brightly colored athletic wear—stood out among the drab but formal uniform of most Parisian kids, clearly marking them as residents of the peripheries. They were obviously issus de l’immigration— second or third-generation French youth whose families were from the former colonies—though no one really articulated these distinct…

“Incoherence is important to me,” Sohrab Hura observed in a 2019 interview. “It is a reflection of the violent deluge of imagery that I feel I am living with every day.” Hura’s evocative work is animated by a deeply personal way of parsing the world, through projects that have focused on cities along the Ganges River, the geography of the lower Mississippi River, and more recently in Kashmir. Relying on a complex narrative structure, his award-winning book The Coast (2019) comprises a carefully sequenced collection of repetitive and immersive images. A member of Magnum Photos and an editor and curator in his own right, Hura, who is based in New Delhi, projects his vision while also advocating for other image makers in his orbit. Bruce Lee and Being Like Water Be formless,…