Aperture Magazine

For someone who has made a career of contemplating sight, Hiroshi Sugimoto is skeptical of appearances. “All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes,” he once remarked. Born in Tokyo in 1948, a son in a family of merchants, Sugimoto studied economics before deciding, in 1970, to go west—not to America, but to the Soviet Union, on a backpacking trip inspired by the utopian promises of the socialist experiment.

Opening on September 18, 2026, Aperture’s new home at 380 Columbus Avenue features a bookstore and gallery with a rotation of intimate photography presentations and a dynamic calendar of programming. The inaugural installation, Aperture Loves New York, pays tribute to photographers who have shaped—and been shaped by—the city.

Aperture and PhotoWork have come together to present a series of programs featuring the PhotoWork Senior Fellows. The inaugural program will feature presentations by the 2025 Senior Fellows: Michelle Arcila, Will Matsuda, and José Ibarra Rizo. Each artist will present the body of work created throughout the fellowship, followed by an intimate discussion on process and practice with their Mentors: Ron Jude, Raymond Meeks, and Kristine Potter.

Join us at Aperture for a special conversation between Anshika Varma from Offset Projects and Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich from 10×10 Photobooks, as they discuss the independent publishing scene from New Delhi to New York. Offset Projects is a curatorial initiative engaging with acts of reading and creation through photography’s relationship with printed matter.

Visitors to Rencontres d’Arles will know the long, hot walk down the circular ring road that surrounds the old city, mimicking the shape of the bullring at its center, to the brutalist beauty of the Monoprix supermarket at its end. The crescent-shaped building topped by large, yellow cement blocks bearing its name is, for the duration of the storied annual photography festival in southern France, home to multiple exhibitions, accessible only through the clothing section of the high-end store.

In my thirty-two years of teaching photography, working with students has never been separate from the rest of my artistic life; it has always been a parallel yet deeply interwoven practice. Looking back, I am struck not by any single revelation but by the accumulation of conversations and shared discoveries that took place in classrooms, studios, hallways, and offices.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, Spring 2016, “Odyssey.” An adventurer turned photographer, Ishikawa Naoki has journeyed from the North Pole to the South Pole using only human-powered vehicles. He is the youngest person ever to have scaled the highest peaks on all seven continents, as well as K2, one of the world’s most hazardous mountains.

Please join us at Aperture for a special conversation between photographer and filmmaker Gillian Laub and artist and curator Jil Weinstock to celebrate the opening of our new home and inaugural presentation, Aperture Loves New York. The two will discuss Laub’s history in New York City and her acclaimed career, including an iconic photograph from her book Family Matters (Aperture, 2021), featured in the installation.

Please join us at Aperture for a special conversation between artist Coreen Simpson and writer and curator Rujeko Hockley to celebrate the opening of our new home and inaugural installation, Aperture Loves New York. The two will discuss Simpson’s influential practice and storied history of photographing in New York. Aperture has a rich and vibrant history of publishing photographs made in New York and by New Yorkers.

Please join us at Aperture’s new home for a special conversation between photographer Stephen Shore and Lucy Gallun, Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. To mark the opening of our inaugural presentation Aperture Loves New York, which features an image from his landmark photobook Uncommon Places (Aperture, 1982 and 2015), the two will discuss Shore’s enduring legacy.