Aperture Spring 2026

IAN BOURLAND (“Beneath the Surface,” page 72) is an associate professor of contemporary art history at Georgetown University and the author of Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s (2019) and Black & Gold: Transmutations of Metal and Modernity, which was published in February. Previously, Bourland contributed an essay for Aperture on photographer Robert Frank’s connections to music. Here, he illuminates how the histories of American image-making and natural resource extraction are deeply entwined in an essay prompted by the exhibition Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, which opens this May at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. SEAN J PATRICK CARNEY (“Terra Infirma,” page 126) is a writer, visual artist, and educator, and the founder of Social Malpractice Publishing, an independent distribution label for artists’ books.…

Catherine Opie Catherine Opie rose to eminence in the 1990s as the court portraitist to Los Angeles’s leather-dyke scene during the height of the culture wars. Since then, she has continued to photograph her queer circle of friends and intimates while documenting other subcultures: surfers, protestors, football players, ice fishermen, Boy Scouts. Opie’s first retrospective in the United Kingdom explores this expansive, conceptually charged body of portraiture and how it makes visible the countenance of American democracy itself. Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery, London, March 5–May 31, 2026 Martin Parr “I respect what you’re doing, but I think you’re from a different planet,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once told Martin Parr. With his lurid flash and ultrasaturated palette, the British photographer might seem like an emissary from…

It is the second day of fall, and the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are alive with the layered rhythms of New York. A performance artist slathered in white paint moves slowly across the plaza as a saxophonist bends a bluesy note nearby. Anti-Trump protesters chant along Fifth Avenue. Painters hawk canvases from folding tables, tourists pose for pictures, and fashionistas stage their own impromptu photoshoots on the museum’s iconic steps. Into this scene steps Louis Mendes, eighty-five years old and impeccably dressed in a beige suit, oxblood turtleneck, and brimmed hat. Around his shoulder, a massive vintage Speed Graphic press camera fitted with old-style flash bulbs, a relic from a bygone era. In one sense, Mendes is just another participant in this street-side economy, offering his wares…

In 1978, the photographer Sophie Rivera had a style break—or, more precisely, a breakthrough. A former ballet dancer who pivoted to image-making in her thirties, she immediately demonstrated a talent for confronting society’s ideals of the human body. Her first solo show, at the West Village’s Third Eye Gallery, in 1973, featured male nudes in tender close-up. She followed this work with photographs of anatomically correct dolls and a series of “self-portraits” in the form of her own bloody tampons floating in a toilet bowl. In 1978, though, she shifted to a more classical, yet arguably even more vulnerable, kind of body-conscious imagemaking. Rivera, who was born in New York but was of Puerto Rican descent, ventured out from her studio to ask passersby in Morningside Heights whether they were…

Colorful auras, headless figures, ghosts caught on camera: Photographers have long been drawn to the macabre and the occult. The press in 1839 called daguerreotypes “magic mirrors” and said that photographs appeared “as if by magic.” After all, the medium developed during a time when stage magicians packed theaters and spiritualists, many of them women, promised contact with the dead. Ever since, photographers have sought to not just document the world but evoke a sense of wonder and spectacle that we continue to call magic. Among the strangest novelties of Victorian photography were disembodied heads—displayed on platters, tucked under arms, even juggled. By the 1870s, faux decapitations had become a popular amusement, captured in cartes-de-visite like this one. When Albert A. Hopkins published Magic in 1897, he entered a territory…

This is a photograph of William Dexter, headmaster of the Lower School at Hackley, a boarding school in the Lower Hudson Valley that my parents banished me to when I was eleven. He’s making a group portrait of the soccer team. Mr. D., as we called him, had an apartment at the end of my hall, where he had a darkroom. He knew of and encouraged my interest in photography and let me work in his darkroom. Up until then, I had only used my converted bathroom for processing and printing. I made this picture in the autumn of 1960, when I was twelve, or perhaps had just turned thirteen. I took it with my new Nikon F. For the previous four years, I had been using a Ricoh 35…