Aperture Winter 2021

Samuel Fosso “I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know was that I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become,” the shape-shifting photographer Samuel Fosso said in an interview with the late curator and critic Okwui Enwezor. Fosso’s iconic studio self-portraits—in which the Cameroonian-born, Nigerian photographer transforms himself into such characters as a liberated American woman, a colonial-era chief, or a fashion avatar—are presented by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, in a career retrospective. The exhibition spans Fosso’s earliest works from the 1970s, made when he was a teenager in the Central African Republic, to his late 1990s collaboration with Vogue Paris, staged portraits of Black leaders across the diaspora, and recent Polaroid studies of his emotional states. Samuel Fosso at the Maison…

Last summer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with many museums in between, were rightly criticized for their responses to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others at the hands of police and to the protests sparked by those tragedies. Several institutions searched their collections and used artworks by Black artists, without permission, in social media posts. Some paired images with statements that did not directly condemn the killings or adequately acknowledge the pain in their communities. As Kimberly Drew, a writer and formerly the social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum, put it on Twitter, “I understand firsthand that finding something to say can be hard work. I am also saying that I would like to see you do that…

Twenty-six were shot; fourteen died. All were unarmed. The victims: civilians. The shooters: soldiers. These are the bare facts of Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972, the day the British Army’s First Battalion Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil rights march on the streets of Derry, targeting protesters even as they ran for cover or rushed to help the injured. In the years since, there have been whitewash tribunals and extended inquiries, a hard-won state apology, and then, this July, the collapse of a long-awaited criminal investigation into one of the soldier’s actions, the latest of many setbacks faced by families seeking justice after almost a half century of grief and anger. The Northern Irish Troubles—a euphemism born both from the stoical tendencies of this tight-lipped society and…

A writer and theorist of visual culture and the Black diaspora, Tina Campt has long been attuned to the profound possibilities of archive building. In her thought-provoking books, Campt narrates new, or newly revealed, artistic lineages from vernacular photographs of Afro-European subjects in the early and mid-twentieth century to contemporary images that assert a distinctively Black gaze on life and loss today. Here, Campt reflects on that which sustained her over the pandemic’s past few seasons of grief: the art and media that offered the gift of getting lost in other worlds and made it possible “to imagine a life beyond what felt like a year of endless death.” Garrett Bradley, Time, 2020 Watching Garrett Bradley’s film Time felt like being engulfed in a wave. After screening it for the first time…

On the hot and humid afternoon of May 10, 1974, in Dallas, Texas, my mother, Dolores, known to everyone as Lollie, visited with my great-grandfather Juan Sosa, who went by the anglicized name of John. My mother brought John his lunch as he lay bedridden from illness and age. She told him that she was pregnant and going to have a daughter. He cried, perhaps realizing he would never see the baby, and with tears in his eyes said, “How wonderful, mija.” She left the room, and when she returned shortly after to pick up his tray, he had passed away. I was born four months later. Although I never knew John, I always liked to imagine his last encounter with my mother and felt connected to him through that…

The history of Latinx people in photography is sordid. Often, we are the subject of suspect representation: grotesque stereotypes and racialized images that pathologize Latinx bodies as hypersexualized, criminalized, diseased, derelict, or dead. For the most part, the camera hasn’t been good to us. As photographic technologies developed from the mid-nineteenth into the twentieth century, so too did the ease with which depictions of Latinx people could be produced in photography and film, and imprinted on the cultural imagination. To this very day, we still encounter Latinx stereotypes that first appeared in early forms of photography. A nuanced account of Latinx photography is also difficult to discover. It takes searching family holdings, scouring library collections, and chasing fugitive archives to bring Latinx people into the story of photography in a way…