Books in the Aperture Magazine series

This winter, in the wake of a pandemic, global protest movements, and a dramatic presidential election in the United States, Aperture releases ¿Utopia,¿ an issue that shows that other ways of living are possible¿when the collective will exists.In ¿Utopia,¿ artists, photographers, and writers envision a world without prisons, document visionary architecture, honor queer space and creativity, and dream of liberty through spiritual self-expression. They show us that utopia is not a far-fetched scheme, but rather a way of reshaping our future.In a profile, Salamishah Tillet considers Tyler Mitchell¿s visions of Black people resting in open green space, a democratizing landscape in which Mitchell continuously asks himself: ¿What are the things that I can do to lessen the inherent hierarchies in the photography-shoot structure of seeing and being seen?¿ Sara Knelman shows the freeing possibilities of the feminist collage works of Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Sara Cwynar, and Alanna Fields. Julian Rose speaks with the filmmaker Matt Wolf about his latest documentary, Spaceship Earth (2020), which follows the people who created Biosphere 2 in 1991. And Antwaun Sargent traces Black queer artists¿ journeys into immersive desire. ¿Utopiä also includes compelling portfolios by David Benjamin Sherry, Allen Frame, and Balarama Heller, whose respective works span time and geography, from bohemian New York to a Hare Krishna retreat in India.¿The utopian imagination tends to stir when the world feels simultaneously wrecked and malleable,¿ the writer Chris Jennings notes, in a series of reflections by writers such as Olivia Laing and Nicole R. Fleetwood. Notions of utopia shouldn¿t be restricted to the fantasy of a fully realized ideal society, or the outsize, often failed, sometimes disastrous schemes and social experiments of the past. Instead, we might consider utopia a mode of vision and thought that shields us from hopelessness.

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.