Aperture

Judith Joy Ross Judith Joy Ross was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and found photography as a student at the Moore College of Art & Design, in Philadelphia, in the 1960s. She made most of her indelible, instantly recognizable portraits in the eastern Pennsylvania towns of Weatherly and Bethlehem, where she discovered in her subjects—teenagers, students, soldiers, a car-rental salesman, a gas-station attendant—a transcendent individuality. “Judith has this immense ambition for the work,” says Peter Barberie, a curator of photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the only US institution presenting Ross’s acclaimed traveling retrospective, which originated at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. “It’s about being alive in our time,” he says. Although Ross’s concern for the relationship between individuals and social class has been compared to August Sander’s portraiture, the…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…