Aperture

Charlotte March Celebrated for her mid-century fashion photographs in Vogue and Vanity Fair—and for her portraits of the Black supermodel Donyale Luna in the West German magazine Twen—Charlotte March also extensively captured the streets and daily life of postwar Hamburg. As part of the city’s 8th Triennial of Photography, Currency, which considers themes of circulation and knowledge, March’s work is being presented at the Falckenberg Collection. This retrospective focuses on March’s sensitive portrayals of Hamburg, where she lived throughout her life, and Ischia, Italy, where she traveled in the 1950s and 1960s. “In their depiction of forms of simple work and social life that were already disappearing at the time they were taken,” say the curators Goesta Diercks and Dirk Luckow, March’s images “can be read as a reference to the…

Janet Delaney’s work experience started early. “As soon as I learned to write, I took orders for my dad on the phone, his clients knew me,” Delaney said recently. “Shirley would call and say, ‘Hey, Janet, can you tell your dad that I need a case of perms?’” Bill Delaney, her father, was a beauty supply salesman, 1960s, LA region, servicing shops in prosaic places such as San Pedro and Wilmington. His inventory was stored in the garage—and in the Plymouth Valiant required to cover his territory. “You’d have to push the rollers and cases of lipstick over so you could sit in the back,” Delaney recalls. “It’s probably why I’m so fascinated with photographing work. I lived in it.” The theme has persisted in Delaney’s art at this foundational human level.…

In 2003, the Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, then an unknown graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, debuted a durational colossus: West of the Tracks, a nine-hour document of industrial decline in the Tiexi factory district of Shenyang Province. Amassed over four years with little more than an amateur video camera and faith in the instructive texture of reality, West of the Tracks found a new form for the chasmic infrastructural changes of post-Socialist China. Immense run times and handheld spontaneity have come to define most of Wang’s subsequent films, each teeming with the minutiae of daily subsistence in various pockets of regional China. Although Wang is attuned to the present, his work is always marked by a broader intuition of historical process and state-led economic restructuring. His subjects have spanned the…

On West Jefferson Boulevard, a four-lane thoroughfare that cuts east-west through South Central Los Angeles, the din of the city is loud as cars and trucks streak down the blocks. Anthony Hernandez’s studio occupies a small storefront right on West Jefferson, in a brief commercial district squeezed between the more residential, “historic” neighborhoods of Jefferson Park and West Adams. On a sunny Saturday morning in mid-February, its painted-pink facade seemed to bask in the heavy sunlight and sound, soaking them both in. Across the street, a clothes boutique blasted reggaeton from speakers stationed by its open doors. Once inside, the street seemed to fall away. As I walked into his studio, I felt the air cool and the light brighten to a crisp white. The clamor of the city quickly deadened,…

The French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan grew up reading a comic-book version of the Ramayana, the epic Indian poem about Rama, a legendary prince and deity. In 2013, while traveling in India, Yogananthan began work on his own retelling of the Ramayana, a seven-volume photobook called A Myth of Two Souls (2013–21), which incorporates spectacular pastel-hued staged photographs, often rendered with delicate hand-painting techniques, along with intimate accounts of nighttime festivals, where he had to find each flash-lit image in complete darkness. The idea of connecting contemporary India to ancient narrative, of “traveling through time and space,” is at the center of the project, Yogananthan has said. “It’s something photography is really good at.” Etel Adnan I wonder if immediacy plays a part in Etel Adnan’s unique color combinations. She completed her small…

It is easy to imagine Alec Soth daydreaming in pictures. As an acclaimed photographer, teacher, publisher, YouTuber, and one-time blogger, he is as dedicated to thinking about what pictures mean as he is to making them. Since his acclaimed 2004 debut, Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series he described not as a chronicle of place but an excuse to wander, Soth has made lyrical bodies of work—modest meditations on consciousness—that parse the surfaces of the everyday. “In my projects, I allow myself to change course and follow my nose,” he notes of his process, which is decidedly driven by a search for serendipity. As guest editor, Soth pursued a theme that wouldn’t constrain him. “This ‘Sleepwalking’ issue,” he says, “is one in which I’m always surprised on turning the page, where…