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
In the winter of 2021, Luke Oppenheimer arrived in the Tien Shan mountains of central Kyrgyzstan with a straightforward assignment: document the wolves that prey on livestock in the remote shepherding village of Ottuk. Each year, wolves descend from the high ridges to kill dozens of horses and countless sheep. For families whose wealth is measured in hooves and wool, these losses are catastrophic. The men ride into the mountains during the harshest winter months to track and hunt the predators, navigating blizzards and subzero nights in defense of their herds.
Spanning more than a decade of journeys and visual discoveries, Stories Untold is the ambitious new publication by internationally acclaimed photographer Calla Fleischer, a traveler whose lens is guided as much by curiosity as by empathy. Expansive in both scale and spirit, the nearly 400-page volume gathers a rich tapestry of images that explore the subtleties of the human experience—from fleeting gestures in crowded streets to quiet, contemplative portraits that linger long after the page is turned.
The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway is a groundbreaking photographic and historical project by Charleston-based photographer Virginia McGee Richards, published by MIT Press in April 2026. The work uncovers a little-known chapter of American history, revealing a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals—called “cuts”—dug by enslaved people between the 17th and 18th centuries along the Atlantic coastline from Charleston, South Carolina to St. Augustine, Florida.
"Another Time, Another Place" is an homage to New York City in the 1980s, when it was raw, chaotic, and alive with possibility. Downtown Manhattan was a place where art, music, performance, and nightlife collided—igniting a cultural revolution that still echoes today.
Where Do I Go? is the newest photobook by Rania Matar, bringing together approximately 128 color portraits of young women living in Lebanon today. Released in the shadow of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War, the book offers a meditation on life shaped by prolonged instability, without allowing conflict to dominate the narrative. Instead of foregrounding destruction, Matar centers creativity, dignity, and resilience, crafting a body of work that quietly insists on the complexity of everyday existence amid uncertainty.
Award-winning Palestinian photographer Ahmad Al-Bazz presents a groundbreaking new work, The Erasure of Palestine, the result of a three-year journey documenting the remnants of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns depopulated and destroyed from 1948 to the present. Through his lens, Al-Bazz confronts history, memory, and contemporary occupation, offering a stark counter-narrative to the dominant historical record.
With Cockaigne, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer directs his gaze toward the largely unseen machinery of contemporary food production. Drawing inspiration from the medieval legend of the “Land of Cockaigne” — a fantasy of limitless abundance — Sailer examines the very real systems, technologies, and infrastructures that underpin how food is produced, distributed, and controlled today. The book challenges readers to rethink ideas of nourishment, consumption, and collective responsibility.
In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast, signaling peace following 30 years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. Photographer Julie McCarthy photographed annually for five years on Shankill Road, a one-mile Protestant/Loyalist enclave running parallel to the Catholic/Republican area. A wall called the “Peace Wall” divides the two communities.
For the first time, Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings brings together the full transcripts of key historic recordings made with and by the acclaimed British photographer, writer, and feminist Jo Spence (1934–1992), alongside a wealth of unpublished photographs and documents. This landmark book offers an intimate window into the life, work, and politics of one of the most influential figures in British documentary photography.
