Aperture, Issue 253: Desire

Aperture magazine was founded in 1952 by a small circle of photographers–Ansel Adams, Minor White, Barbara Morgan and Dorothea Lange–and the photography historians Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. These individuals wished to foster the development and appreciation of the photographic medium, as well as communicate with “serious photographers and creative people everywhere, whether professional, amateur, or student.” Today the magazine maintains the founders’ spirit, presenting a diversity of historical work, photojournalism and portfolios by emerging photographers, thematic articles, as well as interviews with important figures at work today.

Aperture has published the work of many iconic and emerging artists including Diane Arbus, Walead Beshty, Shannon Ebner, JH Engström, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Paul Graham, Josef Koudelka, Sally Mann, Richard Misrach, Stephen Shore, Sara VanDerBeek and James Welling. The magazine has also showcased leading writers and curators in the field including Vince Aletti, John Berger, Geoffrey Batchen, David Campany, Charlotte Cotton, Geoff Dyer, Mary Panzer, Luc Sante, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, David Levi Strauss, among many others.

In this issue:

Aperture magazine releases winter issue, “Desire,” featuring an expansive interview with renowned fashion photographer Juergen Teller

“Photographs can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way,” Susan Sontag observed. Hers was a reference to more prurient activities, but she also allowed that desire could be abstract, something more slippery. The compulsion to want—or, in today’s parlance, to manifest—emerges throughout Aperture’s winter 2023 issue, “Desire,” as both an impulse and a state of mind.

“Desire” includes an expansive interview with Juergen Teller, whose photographs upend fashion’s vocabulary of glamour and aspiration, trading conventional beauty for the more peculiar. Artists such as Nakeya Brown, Jonathas de Andrade, Nabil Harb, Oto Gillen, and Marcelo Gomes consider what it means to put one’s own body on display, to break from long-standing customs, to be seduced by raw beauty found in nature or in uncanny artifice. Histories are conjured through evocative personal objects in the work of Ishiuchi Miyako, who for decades has created beguiling images that in two dimensions are at once surreal and surprisingly physical. In “Desire,” photographers render reality as unearthly—and take the viewer somewhere else altogether.