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

Curriculum Sara Cwynar • Sara Cwynar is a Vancouver-born photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist living in Brooklyn. She is best known for vibrant collages that evoke the dopamine-driven feeds of social media. To make them, she conducts a chaotic array of influences—among them eBay, luxury fashion ads, art history, and amateur snapshots—into visual symphonies, exploring how the pathologies of late capitalism fuel what she has called our collective and personal “desire for desire.”

Contributors

Exhibitions to See

Notebook • The color red can evoke love, anger, and—especially for photographers—danger. What makes red so tricky?

Viewfinder • The US–Mexico border is often framed as a site of emergency. Two photographers move beyond crisis-driven narratives.

Studio Visit • Nigel Shafran’s East London darkroom radiates a convivial warmth.

Redux • In 1975, a group exhibition quietly shifted the course of American landscape photography.

The Seoul Issue

Heinkuhn Oh About Face

Becoming Seoul • Since the late nineteenth century, photographers have charted the political and social tumult of the capital city.

Screen Time • How do artists respond to a city of hallucinatory surfaces, where vision itself feels programmed?

Space Is the Place • For sixty years, one architecture magazine has charted South Korea’s rise.

Youngsook Park Visions

Bohnchang Koo The Collector • For this artist, history speaks through objects.

Yezoi Hwang Flashback Diary

Doyeon Gwon Into the Wild

Chorong An K-Fragments

Sung Jin Park Colossal Youth

NIKKI S. LEE Stays in the Picture • In the late 1990s, the artist ascended to fame in New York. These days, she is back in Seoul pursuing a different kind of creative life.

Heeseung Chung Signals

Suntag Noh Stranger Things

MOMENTUM

The PhotoBook Review

Director’s Cut • Yorgos Lanthimos talks about his unlikely career as a photobook maker.

Salon Style • Hair has long fascinated photographers, resulting in a subgenre of publications on the cultural complexities of manes, locks, and curls.

Describing Pictures • How can visual books reach blind audiences?

Reviews

Endnote Ed Park • Personal Days, Ed Park’s debut novel, comically skewers the absurd drudgery of corporate office life. In 2023, he published his acclaimed sophomore novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, a Pulitzer finalist. A sprawling book with multiple storylines, it offers, among many gifts, an alternate history of the Korean Provisional Government, formed during the Japanese occupation. His story collection An Oral History of Atlantis was released this summer.