Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2016 en Aperture

From its stark white title on a black cover to its final text predicting riots in Washington, D.C., Leonard Freed’s photobook Black in White America (1968) is a blistering and prescient vision of race in America. Compiled at the height of racial tension and civil rights demonstrations, bracketed by the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Freed’s volume is a penetrating journey through a vast terra incognita for white folks, depicting, in words and images, the other side of the tracks from Harlem to New Orleans to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. As a young white New Yorker who had mostly been living in Europe for the previous decade, Freed traveled the byways of race in America like a foreigner, with an air…

It seems that it’s time, once again, to consider the naked truths revealed by second-wave feminist art. In 2007, a year of women in the arts was spearheaded by WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, a traveling exhibition of women’s art from the 1970s organized by Connie Butler for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. That year also saw Global Feminisms, at the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art’s two-day symposium “The Feminist Future.” Traveling since 2010, the exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna returns to the achievements of that formative decade. An assembly of photo-based work by thirty-four artists, the exhibition was organized by Gabriele Schor, who is also editor of the accompanying publication discussed here (its other primary…

As a young woman, the conceptual artist Gillian Wearing posed and vamped in photo booths. In the footsteps of Andy Warhol and the rest of the world, she subsequently transitioned to Polaroids. Like today’s selfies, Wearing’s Polaroids often capture her outstretched arm in the act of triggering the shot. Her long-term series My Polaroid Years consists of instant self-portraits dating from 1988 to 2005—from age twenty-four, shortly after Wearing entered the graduate art program at Goldsmiths College in London, until forty-two, in the midst of producing her seminal self-portrait series Album (2003–6). The Polaroids reproduced here for the first time are selected from almost 150 that were recently exhibited by her New York gallery in a wooden vitrine, like museum artifacts, thus indicating their relationship to her career-long fascination with selfdocumentation. In roughly…

In 1971, Linda Nochlin famously asked in the title of an essential essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Lamenting the meager representation of women in art, she declared: “There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol.” In the heated debates of second-wave feminism, these dialogues were crucial and vital, and were essential to creating a more pluralistic narrative of art in the twentieth century. But those conversations rarely included photography—or film, or architecture, or design, for that matter—art forms that were other. Photography is now our lingua franca—it is the dominant medium of our image-saturated era. Over the last half century photography has joined the ranks of painting and…

Talking openly and publicly about abortion is one of Western society’s most enduring taboos. Even in the few countries where access to abortion is not restricted, attempts to raise consciousness about abortion invariably are met with clenched fists and racing pulses, with most people presenting fully developed, strong views that render any civil discussion futile, if not impossible. The subject’s volatility increases exponentially in regions in which Catholicism is entangled with government policy, dramatically limiting abortion on religious grounds. On Abortion (2016), a research-based project by Spanishborn, Barcelona-based artist Laia Abril, provides a harrowing record of the repercussions of governmental and societal restrictions on abortion. With approximately ninety photographs and accompanying expository texts, On Abortion traces the long history of women’s struggles for access to family planning methods, including contraception and…

More than one hundred years before Laura Mulvey coined the phrase “the male gaze” in the 1970s, pioneers of photography such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, were fully aware of what it meant to author one’s own image. The abolitionist Sojourner Truth deployed her portrait for the cause of freedom. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” her cartes-de-visite read. A medium that could fabricate denigrating notions of gender and identity would also be wielded in the service of self-expression and personal transformation. As Julia Bryan-Wilson writes in these pages, “Female photographers have long been riveted by the structures of gender—its theatrics, its stereotypes—in order to explode them.” This issue focuses on intergenerational dialogues, debates, and strategies of feminism in photography and considers the…

“Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted.” Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, 1990 Long before the flames of the feminist culture wars of the 1980s ignited over fractious issues such as pornography and the politics of erotic representation, Cosey Fanni Tutti navigated this thorny landscape through her art practice. Perhaps better known in the experimental music community as a cofounder of the groundbreaking band Throbbing Gristle (active from 1973 to the early 1980s), Fanni Tutti led a double life in the same period, working as a model and performer in the porn industry in the United Kingdom. Without framing her participation under the relatively “safe cover” of her identity as an artist, Fanni Tutti was completely immersed in the sex…

Renée Cox knows a thing or two about style. A former fashion model for Glamour and photographer for Essence, Cox had an early career in New York defined by the rapid pace of commercial assignments. In her thirties, turning to fine art photography, she began the first of several self-portrait series, portraying a multitude of stylized, powerful, and iconoclastic black women. These avatars— historic characters, fierce mothers, cosmopolitan socialites, and Afro-centric superheroes—are imbued with sexual agency and resolute confidence. Cutting a distinctive path in contemporary photography, Cox’s icons narrate a field of vision where black women perform for the world on their own terms. Running in parallel to Cox’s photography is the evolving image of black women in popular American media and culture, including such icons as Angela Davis, Grace…

For a woman living today, nostalgia strikes me as a WTF move. I mean, helloooo ladies! Women are better off in the twentyfirst century than we ever were before. Many, but still not all of us, enjoy a host of rights and freedoms that were unavailable even during our mothers’ youths. Pulling back a few generations ago to first-wave feminist struggles, I know few women who long for the days when we were treated as de jure minors: politically disenfranchised, refused property rights and access to higher education, our free movement in public space denied, our lives largely circumscribed by domestic labor and child-rearing. Rights for women to be treated as equal citizens have been won over many centuries, a process requiring countless protests and demands for recognition, and in…

She is striding down the middle of the empty street. She is striding down the street flanked by palm trees. She is striding down the street in a gray dress and strappy, red, open-toed shoes. She is striding down the street coming toward us. She is striding down the street holding a brick in one hand. This large-scale, life-size photograph of Johanna Saavedra— a trans, Latina activist—is part of Andrea Bowers’s series Trans Liberation (2016), produced in collaboration with artist and organizer Ada Tinnell. Trans Liberation features three trans women activists of color—Saavedra, CeCe McDonald, and Jennicet Gutierrez— photographed with weapons (brick, hammer, rifle) and in postures that nod to historical representations of revolutionary insurrection. Saavedra’s brick, for instance, references both a famed graphic from the student/worker uprisings of May…

Through photography, video, performance, and cultural criticism, Martha Rosler has rigorously probed a host of sociopolitical questions with signature intelligence and wit. From her classic video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), which humorously critiqued women’s role in society, to her canny photomontages that juxtapose scenes of American domestic comforts with images of foreign wars, she has used her artwork to shine a hard light on urgent realities. Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” 1957 In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes compellingly dissects The Family of Man, the encyclopedic photography exhibition that achieved great resonance when it was featured at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Barthes’s unsparing analysis revealed, despite the show’s perhaps laudable aspirations, the sentimentality of its anthropological premise—in which all people, no matter how different,…

David Campany: You have all been involved with exhibitions and publications dedicated to women photographers who began their working lives between the wars. The 1920s and 1930s, particularly in Europe, still loom large in any history of photography because of the flowering of various modernisms and avant-gardes, and, of course, the expansion of the illustrated mass media and the photographic book. Perhaps less discussed is the rich exchange between these fields. Photographers moved easily right across visual culture. And it’s notable how many of the most dynamic figures were women: Germaine Krull, Laure Albin-Guillot, Florence Henri, Grete Stern, and many others. Why was this? Was the medium open to them in a way the other arts were not? Was it to do with photography at that point being a medium…

“For years we as lesbian-feminists have been fighting male pornography,” a reader named Donna from Washington, D.C., wrote. “It shocks and abhors me to find that women have stooped to the same methods.” To scan the letters pages of the San Francisco– based magazine On Our Backs, published from 1984 to 2005, is to find lesbian erotica thrown into relief against the backdrop of the feminist sex wars. Antagonisms that characterized the movement in the 1980s play out in an epistolary exchange, and through the rancor, a contrasting story emerges. “How different— bold—and wonderful to see (for my first time) women enjoying women,” another reader commented. “It makes me remember that I’m not alone in my thoughts, although fairly secluded in South Carolina,” says another. One reader gets right to…

The inhabitant of this one-bedroom Munich apartment treated his living space as a display for the arrangement of a vast collection. In his personal Wunderkammer, every shelf was stuffed with books and DVDs, every inch of wall space was covered with images—cut-outs from magazines and newspapers as well as personal photographs, but also matchboxes, receipts, and other ephemera that all served to display a private passion. The desire to possess pictures and the embrace of a spectatorship that resists any hierarchy between the images of celebrities or of friends form a vivid interior (in the double sense of the word, being both a physical and imaginative mental space) where mediated and personal experience seamlessly intertwine. This private exhibition of a personal archive became the subject of German artist Katharina Gaenssler’s…

In his endearingly titled book Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials (2014), the philosopher Michel Serres reflects upon his college-age students, who, for him, embody a new technological order. Not only do they communicate and relate in new ways, but their bodies are decidedly different—their heads are quite literally in their hands. For artist Josephine Pryde, too, this fusion between the body and the technological device is not just a cyborgian proposition, but an opportunity to imagine what our heads might now be freed to do if our fingers do the thinking. This point of contact between the hand and the machine, which Pryde describes as “the join,” also represents a gap between what we can literally see and the immense effects that these changes will inevitably have on…

They were the women of the future: the lawyers, doctors, and police officers. But, in these satirical postcards, produced in France at the turn of the twentieth century, their professions are solely masculine. At the time, the French language itself, which considers nouns to be either feminine or masculine, couldn’t conceive of a female mayor or second lieutenant, or any job in the public interest. (To this day, there is no feminine word for judge—or plumber.) And while these women might be emancipated through their imaginary métiers, their fashions tell a different story. If they’re not sexualized with bare arms and tight uniforms, they’re butched up, neutralized, and swathed in big coats and top hats. When such cards were in circulation, French feminists and antifeminists were embattled. Accusing working women…