Books in the Aperture Magazine series

More than two million people are currently incarcerated in the United States. While the country accounts for 5 percent of the global population, it is home to 25 percent of the world's prison population. How can photography help us understand this vast system, and the lives shaped-and disrupted-by mass incarceration? From a reflection on the origins of the mug shot to stark aerial views of supermax prisons to recent projects focused on everyday life in New York's Riker's Island, Louisiana's Angola Prison, and California's San Quentin Prison, this issue considers the visual record, and human toll, of a national crisis that is often removed from public view. Prison Nation is organized with contributing editor Nicole Fleetwood, author of the forthcoming book, Carceral Aesthetics: Prison Art and Public Culture.

Marking the one-year anniversary of New York¿s shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Aperture magazine¿s ¿New York¿ issue honors the city through photographs and essays by visionary artists and writers, from Roe Ethridge and Rosalind Fox Solomon to Hilton Als and Joseph O¿Neill. In ¿New York,¿ acclaimed photojournalist Philip Montgomery speaks with the New York Times Magazine¿s director of photography, Kathy Ryan, about covering the city¿s hospitals at the height of the pandemic. Irina Rozovsky contributes magisterial, sun-dappled visions of Brooklyn¿s Prospect Park landscape. Hua Hsu writes poignantly about the archival photographs that emerged after a fire at the Museum of Chinese in America. Antwaun Sargent speaks with the founders of See In Black, an initiative to support Black photographers and communities. And Tanisha C. Ford profiles Jamel Shabazz, whose indelible images of 1980s street culture are icons of style and joy. Our lives and our city have been transformed over the past year, yet this issue reminds us of how much there is to discover, and relish, when New York comes roaring back.

This summer, Aperture presents a special issue focused on the relationship between photography, urbanism, and activist trajectories from Delhi. Guest edited by Rahaab Allana, the Alkazi Foundation's lead curator, the issue explores multiple incarnations of the city¿s photographic culture, from O. P. Sharmäs experimental works from the 1960s to Aditi Jain¿s intimate tableaux of Delhi¿s trans community today. Interviews with revered writer Arundhati Roy and with Bangladesh¿s best-known photojournalist, Shahidul Alam, illuminate sites of protest in the city and throughout South Asia. Skye Arundhati Thomas revisits Sheba Chhachhi¿s feminist staged portraits from the 1980s and ¿90s. Featuring a cross section of dynamic image-makers and thinkers, such as Jyoti Dhar, Sunil Gupta, Ishan Tankha, and Anshika Varma, and emerging voices Uzma Mohsin and Prarthna Singh, the issue is a distinctive meditation on regionalism, politics, and identity, through archival and contemporary photographic viewpoints.