The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.
Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combatting racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.
Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them.
Publisher : MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2022 | 311 pages
Postcards of a nation embracing a new democratic technology.
The ubiquity of photography and social media today makes it hard to imagine a time when it was not possible for ordinary people to take their own pictures and send them with short messages over long distances. But it was revolutionary when the Eastman Kodak Company, in 1903, unveiled a new postcard camera that produced a postcard-size negative that could print directly onto a blank card. Suddenly almost anyone, amateurs and entrepreneurial photographers alike, could take a picture―of neighbors at home and at work, local celebrations, newsworthy disasters, sightseeing trips―and turn it into a postcard.
This book captures this moment in the history of communications―from around 1900 to 1930―through a generous selection of what came to be known as “real photo postcards” from the extensive Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive. As the formality of earlier photography falls away, these postcards remind us that the past was occupied by people with distinct and individual stories, dramatic, humorous, puzzling and surprising.
After World War II, the American road trip began appearing prominently in literature, music, movies and photography. As Stephen Shore has written, "Our country is made for long trips. Since the 1940s, the dream of the road trip, and the sense of possibility and freedom that it represents, has taken its own important place within our culture." Many photographers purposefully embarked on journeys across the U.S. in order to create work, including Robert Frank, whose seminal road trip resulted in The Americans. However, he was preceded by Edward Weston, who traveled across the country taking pictures to illustrate Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose 1947 trip through the American South and into the West was published in the early 1950s in Harper's Bazaar; and Ed Ruscha, whose road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma formed the basis of Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Hundreds of photographers have continued the tradition of the photographic road trip on down to the present, from Stephen Shore to Taiyo Onorato, Nico Krebs, Alec Soth and Ryan McGinley. The Open Road considers the photographic road trip as a genre in and of itself, and presents the story of photographers for whom the American road is muse. The book features David Campany's introduction to the genre and 18 chapters presented chronologically, each exploring one American road trip in depth through a portfolio of images and informative texts. This volume highlights some of the most important bodies of work made on the road, from The Americans to the present day.
"We were lucky enough to work with some of the greatest photographers in the world who captured many magical moments of our career. This volume brings together some incredible pictures spanning the past fifty years."
Mick Jagger
We’re excited to announce the release of Critical Photojournalism: Contemporary Ethics & Practices, a groundbreaking new book by Judy Walgren and Tara Pixley that reimagines how visual journalism can—and should—be practiced today.
TBW Books is pleased to announce Blood Green, a new artist book by Curran Hatleberg, conceived as a coda to the artist’s acclaimed 2022 monograph, River’s Dream. Blood Green offers an alternate vision—less an outtake than a parallel dream, a shadow of the original, expanding on the darker themes of contemporary American life.
Between 1979 and 1989 the American photographer, David Katzenstein used a series
of Kodak Duaflex cameras, the first of which he purchased at a yard sale in 1975.
Brownie (Hirmer; September 19, 2025, $55) represents the culmination of ten years
experimenting with color photography and using the limitations of the camera as a
way to expand his creative boundaries.
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) spent his groundbreaking and illustrious career
photographing the streets of Tokyo, exploring the city’s gritty underbelly with his handheld film
camera. His black-and-white photographs—which feature subjects from train passengers to a
car on fire to aerial views of postwar Tokyo—reveal Moriyama’s dramatic documentary style as
he plays with light and shadow. Moriyama’s prolific work is marked by his sharp eye for
subjects, use of heavy contrast, and tilted images.
In 2017 photographer Merlin Daleman embarked on a journey through the economic North of the UK. Originally from the West Midlands, Daleman has lived in the Netherlands for most of his adult life. Driven by curiosity to understand the divisions in the UK made evident in the 2016 referendum, he returned to photograph. He revisited the previously familiar with the eyes of an outsider.
One of the world's most celebrated photojournalists and filmmakers, Ed Kashi has dedicated the past 45 years to documenting the social and geopolitical issues that define our era. His newest book, A Period in Time: Looking Back while Moving Forward: 1977–2022, is a stunning and expansive retrospective of photographs spanning the world and his prolific career. Over 200 images collected in this book reflect his commitment to bear witness. Essays and contextual writings combine with the photographs to provide a personal, in-depth look at significant historical events.
Nick Brandt presents a new photography book to be published by Skira Editore with a launch at his new solo exhibition at Hangar Art Center in September
Family Amnesia is a visual tribute and love letter honoring the artist's Chinese American family roots in the United States. The book explores her family's multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, her own captured images and archival material.
