Aperture Magazine

Baldwin Lee, Defuniak Springs, Florida, 1984 © the artist and courtesy Hunters Point Press and Howard Greenberg Gallery A Long Arc: Photography and the American South The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of both photography and America, offering an apt lens through which to examine American identity.

Zig Jackson was a graduate student in San Francisco in the early 1990s when he made Indian Man on the Bus (1994), a brutally humorous black-and-white portrait of a headdressed man traveling by public transit. The man is Jackson himself, the Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara artist who also goes by his Native name Rising Buffalo. The work was published in Aperture in 1995, a year after its creation, signaling its resonance with the photography audience.

The first McDonald’s in Beijing opened in April 1992, in the shopping district of Wangfujing, a short walk from Tiananmen Square. With a total of seven-hundred seats, it was the largest branch of the fast-food chain in the world at the time and served forty thousand customers on its first day alone.

Drama is a window-display gallery in Mexico City’s historic center at the far end of an atrium in a mall whose shops sell collectibles like Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards. Above its long, tall vitrine hangs a large neon sign for Cine Savoy: a two-story porn cinema that’s occupied the building since 1943 (it went blue in 1970).

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is an object lesson in how Surrealist fashion still carries the potential to provoke and scintillate.

I’ve read that Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll were managers of their own miniature theaters. There must have been many other such playhouses in the world. We study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one. —Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, 1992 Szilveszter Makó wants to be in control. Order appeals to him, but only if self-imposed.

Since beginning her career in the 1970s, Ishiuchi Miyako has become one of Japan’s foremost photographers, leading the way for female practitioners in a scene that has traditionally been male dominated. Through subjects as diverse as old apartment blocks, human scars, kimono fabrics, personal belongings of the deceased, and even her own water-damaged prints, Ishiuchi manifests the invisible, capturing time, atmosphere, and memory in photographic form.

Camille Vivier, Horse (I), 2002 © the artist Camille Vivier — Paris For over two decades, Camille Vivier has shrouded the pages of i-D, Dazed, and Purple in an air of fantasy and myth, working in a loose tradition of surrealist fashion photography stretching back to Man Ray. Now, an exhibition in Paris brings her work to museum walls for the first time.

Few photographers are as internationally beloved as Daido Moriyama. The legend of postwar Japanese photography is famous as a member of Provoke, the storied, short-lived avant-garde journal published in the late 1960s. Born in 1938, Moriyama has been steadily working for well over half a century, witnessing dramatic transformations in Japan’s society, economy, and media culture.

The photographer Duane Michals died on June 9, 2026, in New York, where he lived throughout his long and prolific life. In 2022, Michals spoke with Jesse Dorris for Aperture’s Summer 2022 issue, “Sleepwalking,” guest edited by Alec Soth. Here is their conversation. —The Editors Duane Michals doesn’t mince words—about his photography, or anyone else’s. And why should he?