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.
"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
Patterns: Art of the Natural World (Damiani) documents photographer Jon McCormack's meditation on the
geometric patterns that define our planet's most breathtaking landscapes and ecosystems. Through McCormack's
documentation, the Earth reveals itself as both architect and storyteller. Across continents and scales, from
microscopic mineral blooms to vast aerial geometries, the images trace a living grammar of pattern, rhythm, and
resonance that connects the intimate to the immense.
KAOS by Albert Watson is far more than a retrospective monograph spanning more than fifty years of photography. To me, it immediately felt like an object of art—something that insists on being present. With its imposing XL format and nearly eleven pounds, it’s not a book you casually leave on the side of a sofa or slip into a shelf. You place it somewhere with intention. On a table, in full view. Not just as decoration, but as something that invites attention, something you return to
Venezuelan Youth by Silvana Trevale is a powerful photography project exploring identity, resilience, and coming of age in contemporary Venezuela. Blending documentary and portraiture, the series offers an intimate and poetic perspective on youth navigating life amid social and economic challenges. Published by Guest Editions, this compelling body of work redefines visual narratives around Venezuela through sensitivity, depth, and hope.
Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey Through Grief and Gardening by Jane Fulton Alt presents forty-five photographs of a native garden and the flowers and plants that inhabit it. Following the unexpected death of her husband, Howard, Alt assumed responsibility for the nascent ecosystem he had planted in response to his growing concern over climate change. What began as daily stewardship gradually became a source of creative focus and sustenance amid mourning.
Seasons of Time is an intimate photographic exploration of transformation, identity, and the passage of time. Through deeply personal imagery, photographer Nathalie Rubens presents a visual dialogue between two interconnected yet profoundly different stages of life: the emergence into young adulthood and the transition into post-menopausal womanhood. The project brings together portraits of Rubens and her daughter Ruby, creating a powerful meditation on aging, family bonds, and the cyclical nature of human experience.
“It’s unclear who first said, ‘The best camera in the world is the one in your hand,’ or words to that effect, but most of the photographs in this book are the result of having one, or sometimes two with me while on brief holidays or visiting people around Britain.” – Berris Conolly
Released today by Reporters Without Borders, Malick Sidibé, 100 Photos for Press Freedom celebrates the work of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.
Through a selection of iconic images, the album revisits the vibrant world of Malick Sidibé, whose photographs captured the spirit of a generation coming of age in post-independence Mali.
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.
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.
