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.
By Lynda Klich, Benjamin Weiss, Anna Tome, Annie Rudd, Christopher B. Steiner, Eric Moskowitz, Jeff L. Rosenheim
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.
"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
For some travelers, a hotel is simply a place to stay. For LEONE, it is an experience shaped by atmosphere, people, and a sense of belonging. His third book, *A Place We Like*, grew out of a years-long search for that elusive feeling. Published as the inaugural title under the Leisure imprint of C41 Magazine, the project serves as both a visual guide to some of Europe’s most remarkable hotels and a personal reflection on the meaning of hospitality.
Discover Crossing, Kaplan’s powerful documentary photography project capturing Roxham Road, the irregular Canada-US border crossing used by refugees from 2018 to 2023.
Spurred by Trump-era immigration policies, this tiny site between New York and Quebec became a safe, highly unusual microcosm of global migration. Over four years, Kaplan photographed the entire ecosystem—from local cab drivers and border police to the asylum-seekers themselves. Moving past traditional media tropes of victimhood, these photographs challenge stereotypes to highlight the immense courage and resilience required to step into an unknown future before the site's closure in 2023.
I have spent years looking at Lee Friedlander’s America. It has always been a country of sharp angles, cluttered street corners, and shadows that seem to swallow the photographer whole. So when I picked up his latest monograph, Life Still, I expected the familiar noise of his world. Instead, I found something stranger: a 91-year-old master holding his breath.
Part of a bigger journey of liberation through self-exploration, this new photobook by Jo Ann Chaus is above all a collection of self-portraits, complemented by landscapes, still lifes and domestic interiors observed and inhabited by the photographer-cum-model
Blending photography and poetry, Burnt Eyes explores nostalgia, memory, and identity, offering a profound reflection on the complexities of belonging and the stories that shape us.
Seasons of Time by Nathalie Rubens is an intimate and fearless photobook exploring the emotional distance and deep connection between mother and daughter, while confronting the beauty, vulnerability, and physical reality of a woman’s aging body with rare honesty.
1804 continues Rich-Joseph Facun’s exploration of life in the Appalachian foothills of Southeast Ohio, this time turning his lens toward the local university and its complex, symbiotic relationship with the surrounding community.
GOST Books presents Robin Bernstein’s debut photobook MAPALAKATA, a compelling visual investigation into landscape, memory, and the layered histories of Southern Africa. The project offers a nuanced reflection on how geography is not only inhabited, but continually rewritten through movement, extraction, and shifting narratives of belonging.