Kellie McLaughlin under the just released Silvio Wolf limited-edition print, currently only available at Aperture’s booth at Art Chicago.

Earlier this week, two fabulous Aperturians, Kellie McLaughlin and Christina Caputo, drove from New York City to Chicago, Illinois with a van full of Aperture’s brand new books and prints and preview copies of the next issue of Aperture magazine to attend Art Chicago. Stop by and browse, meet some of our favorite artists, or just say hello!

Art Chicago
The International Fair of Contemporary and Modern Art

Friday, May 1–Monday, May 4, 2009
Opening Preview: Thursday, April 30
Booth #12-653

EVENTS AT THE APERTURE BOOTH
MP3: Volume I featuring Kelli Connell, Justin Newhall, and Brian Ulrich
and
MP3: Volume II featuring Curtis Mann, John Opera, and Stacia Yeapanis
Book Signing
Saturday, May 2, 1:00 pm

Private Views, Photographs by Barbara Crane
Artist’s Talk and Book Signing
Saturday, May 2, 5:00 pm

Uncovered, Photographs by Thomas Allen
Book Signing – JUST ANNOUNCED
Sunday, May 3, 1:00 pm

Class Pictures, Photographs by Dawoud Bey
Artist’s Talk and Book Signing
Sunday, May 3, 3:00 pm

SPECIAL EVENT
The Rape of the Sabine Women/Works by Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation
Aperture Foundation Reception
Saturday, May 2, 6:00 pm

Click below for more behind-the-scenes pictures.

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Join author Philip Gefter at SF Camerawork in San Francisco as he discusses his latest title Photography After Frank, a collection of essays published by Aperture. Gefter traces the evolution of photography from Robert Frank’s work, The Americans, to the present day. This highly-anticipated title draws both from work published by Gefter in the New York Times as well as essays written specifically for the book. Don’t miss your chance to meet one of the most insightful contributors to the field of photography.

Photography After Frank, Philip Gefter
Lecture and Book Signing
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 7:00 pm

FREE

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, California
(415) 512-2020

For those on the east-coast, Philip Gefter will be in conversation with Andy Grundberg in New York on May 17, 2009. Click here for full event details.

Click here to purchase your copy of Photography After Frank through Aperture and save 30%.

Join Aperture West Prize-winner Hank Willis Thomas and his mother, artist and scholar Debra Willis, in discussion with curator Kalia Brooks, coinciding with the opening of Progeny at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery. The exhibition, consisting of 48 photographs and 2 videos produced independently and together, focuses on concepts surrounding the influence of family, history, and memory as relevant in artistic expression.

Progeny
Panel Discussion: Wednesday, April 29, 4:30 pm

Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 29, 5:30 pm

Exhibition on view: Thursday, April 30—Saturday, June 6, 2009
Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
Columbia University
826 Schermerhorn Hall, MC5517
1190 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, New York
(212) 854-7288

Click here to purchase Pitch Blackness, Hank Willis Thomas’ first monograph.

Click here to purchase a limited-edition print from Hank Willis Thomas.

Maputo, Mozambique, 2007 © Guy Tillim

Exhibition on view:
Avenue Patrice Lumumba: Photographs by Guy Tillim
Wednesday, April 29–Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Exhibition Opening & Book Signing
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:00 pm

FREE

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Harvard University
11 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
(617) 496-1027

Avenue Patrice Lumumba, an exhibition by the award-winning South African documentary photographer Guy Tillim, opens this Wednesday. The exhibition documents grand colonial African architecture and the way it has shaped the contemporary urban environment in Africa. As the first recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum, Guy Tillim travelled around Angola, Mozambique, Congo and Madagascar to photograph his vision of colonialism in Africa. Even though people are peripheral objects in these photographs, the images retain their intimacy, as evidenced by the number of personal objects, like an umbrella, a book or a purse, that were left behind.

A selection of photographs from the series was featured in the winter 2008 issue of Aperture magazine.

On Monday, April 20, Hugo Gajus Scheltema, Consul General of the Netherlands, hosted an exclusive salon event with Jacqueline Hassink, a Dutch artist whose works deal with issues of power and social relations. Along with Aperture Book Publisher Lesley A. Martin, Ms. Hassink presented her project and Aperture’s Spring 2009 publication, Car Girls—a culmination of a five-year journey to car shows in seven different cities on three continents—to an intimate group of thirty Aperture patrons, art and photography enthusiasts, and select members of the Dutch community.

View The New York Times review of Car Girls.

Click here to preview the limited-edition book Car Girls through Aperture.

Click here to purchase the limited-edition porfolio from Car Girls through Aperture.

Photographer Robin Schwartz’s daughter and subject of her Aperture book, Amelia’s World (Aperture, 2008) from the Tinyvices series, celebrated her 10th birthday last Wednesday. Happy Birthday Amelia!

And coming soon – an exclusive limited-edition print from Robin Schwartz, only on aperture.org. More details in the very near future!

Clouds, Death Valley, 1938 © Edward Weston

Exhibition on view:
Through April 25
Silverstein Photography
535 West 24th St.
New York, New York
(212) 627-3930

This is your last chance to see Cloud 9, a group exhibition displaying the work of renowned photographers Imogen Cunningham, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston. The exhibition is a collection of nine original, vintage photographs of the sky, seen through the lenses of these great masters.
The abstract formation and fleeting nature of clouds, which comes into play in these photographs, evokes dreamy emotions and ideas, and creates a sense of mystery.

Zwelethu Mthethwa, New Works
April 23 – May 23, 2009,

Opening Thursday, April 23, 6 – 8PM

Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street
New York, New York
(212) 645-1701

Opening tonight at Jack Shainman Gallery is the fifth solo show from Zwelethu Mthethwa featuring large format photographs from several new series including, Mozambique, Coal Miners, and Contemporary Gladiators.

His striking portraits show Africans with a sense of dignity and resistance in the face of social and economic hardship. Mthethwa works both in the urban and rural spheres to document domestic life, labor, the environment, and landscape in South Africa and its neighboring countries. By defying the convention to presenting Africa and Africans as visually exotic or diseased, he finds a new approach through his use of scale, color, composition, and his collaboration with his subjects. Mthethwa’s work breathes new life to representation of post-apartheid South African society and globalization.

Aperture will release a publication of Mthethwa’s work to be released in the Fall of 2009. Zwelethu Mthethwa is the artist’s long-awaited first comprehensive monograph, which will provide an overview of his work to-date and feature the stunning portraits that have brought him international acclaim.

In this video excerpt of Dawoud Bey’s discussion with Carrie Mae Weems last February 2008 when Class Pictures was on view at Aperture Gallery, Bey explains how his subjects reacted to the project and what it meant to them, from the making of the portrait to seeing it framed in a museum or published in the accompanying book. He explains that part of his project is to give portrait subjects a chance to simultaneously pose for a photographer and also represent themselves in a written statement. Dawoud furthers that part of his goal is to draw communities, who may not necessarily go to their local museums, into the institution. Many of Dawoud’s subjects found the experience to be surreal and transformative in their own lives.

The exhibition Class Pictures is currently on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum and as part of the opening reception on Thursday, April 23, Dawoud Bey will give a talk and book signing. The exhibition and its coinciding monograph, Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), feature Bey’s striking large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. For the past fifteen years, Bey has been photographing teenagers from a wide economic, social, and ethnic spectrum, and—intensely attentive to their poses and gestures—has created a highly diverse generational portrait that challenges stereotypes of teenagers. A brief autobiographical statement by the subject—by turns poignant, funny, or harrowing—accompanies each portrait.

Click here to watch an extended version of the talk.

Click here to view related events.

© Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

For the past 25 years, the AIDS pandemic has inflicted excruciating pain upon humanity, having ravaged the lives of millions of people around the world. Over the past few years, however, a quiet global revolution has enabled millions infected by HIV to live healthy lives through the free antiretroviral treatment program initiated by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In Access to Life, eight of the world’s leading photojournalists, all members of Magnum Photos, follow thirty individuals in nine countries before, and four months after, they began the antiretroviral treatment, documenting the transformative effect on their bodies, their lives, and the lives of their families. This dream team of photographers was assigned to the following countries: Jonas Bendiksen (Haiti), Jim Goldberg (India), Alex Majoli (Russia), Steve McCurry (Vietnam), Paolo Pellegrin (Mali), Gilles Peress (Rwanda), Eli Reed (Peru), and Larry Towell (South Africa and Swaziland). These powerful images reveal the patients’ complex struggle against the disease with great subtlety and hope.

Coinciding with the release of Access to Life (Aperture, Magnum Photos and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, April 2009), Aperture and The New School are pleased to present a compelling panel discussion with photojournalists Gilles Peress and Kristen Ashburn; Mark Lubell, the Bureau Chief for the Magnum Photos New York and former picture editor of Time magazine MaryAnne Golon; and moderator Fred Ritchin, Associate Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Director of PixelPress.

Following this panel discussion, Aperture will host a reception and book signing on Thursday, April 23 with Magnum photographers in attendance.

Access to Life: Photojournalism on AIDS
Panel Discussion
Wednesday, April 22, 7:00 pm

FREE

The New School
Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York, New York

Access to Life
Book Signing
Thursday, April 23, 7:00 pm

FREE

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555