Aperture

Founded in 1952, Aperture is an essential guide to the world of contemporary photography that combines the finest writing with inspiring photographic portfolios. Each issue examines one theme explored in “Words,” focused on the best writing surrounding contemporary photography, and “Pictures,” featuring immersive portfolios and artist projects.

Aperture

Contributors

Agenda • Exhibitions to See

Viewfinder • As Larry Clark made his chronicle of young outcasts, Tulsa was being upended by an urban renewal scheme.

Spotlight • Winner of the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, Aaryan Sinha recasts familiar visual tropes of life in India.

Redux • In the late 1970s, Rosalind Fox Solomon embedded with William Eggleston, his family, and a circle of Memphis eccentrics.

Curriculum • Nick Knight

Secrets

Dark Rooms Alix Cléo Roubaud

Iñaki Bonillas Barragán’s Closets

Polly Brown Signs & Signals

Taryn Simon Out of Sight • A Conversation with Christopher Glazek

Witness Li Zhensheng • A state photographer during China’s Cultural Revolution quietly made images that contradicted official mandates. Fearing discovery, he hid his negatives for decades beneath his floorboards.

Perfect Strangers • Photography and voyeurism have long been entwined, yet the person most exposed is often behind the lens.

John Divola The X-Files

Sarah Charlesworth Academy of Secrets

Szilveszter Makó Inside the Box • With his distinct theatricality and closely guarded process, the artist conjures his own private world. It’s become a public obsession.

Private Eyes • A series of elaborate, mass-market whodunits reimagined detective work as an aesthetic experience, showing how easily evidence blurs into artifice.

Estelle Hanania Unknown Pleasures

aperture • Aperture, a nonprofit organization, gratefully acknowledges the generosity of the numerous individuals, foundations, corporations, and public funders who contribute in support of our mission.

The PhotoBook Review

Smells Like Print • Aaron Schuman speaks with TBW’s Paul Schiek about the highs and lows of bookmaking.

Los Angeles Story • In Culver City, Arcana keeps the flame of indie bookselling alive.

Double Dutch • For over two decades, Blommers & Schumm have blurred the line between fashion photography and performance art.

Reviews

Endnote • Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze and the author of the novels MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020). His new biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, portrays its subjects—creative and romantic partners for two decades—with the same caliber of psychological depth and rare beauty they themselves brought to their art.