Digital Media Assistant
Aperture Foundation

The position will be responsible for translating content from within the Foundation to our online platforms, including the Aperture Website, Exposures blog, Facebook, Twitter, and our Vimeo page. This includes promoting and publicizing planned events and content, as well as creating an online video and/or photographic archive of these events. The candidate must be comfortable filming, editing and publishing video to both the blog and our Vimeo account.

The ideal candidate is passionate about all things photography and art-related, well-versed in social media and SEO, and familiar with the global photography community as well as the Aperture brand. Candidate must be flexible, organized, efficient and able to juggle multiple projects at once. Candidate must also enjoy working in a small, close-knit team in our busy New York office.

Primary Responsibilities:
• Analyze and report on user activity data; develop the Foundation’s understanding of visitors behavior and their connections to us online
• Strategize ways to increase site audience & engagement• Publish daily content with SEO value, track metrics, monitor and respond to conversations
• Film, edit, and publish video that archives and promotes events
• Moderate blog comments and participate in blog discussions
• Listen to users and solicit and interpret user feedback
• Translate feedback into actionable recommendations for audience growth
• Spearheading & executing social media plans for all blog content
• Assist in updating Aperture general website and store with multi-media and visual content as necessary
• Coordinate and ensure the coherency of Aperture’s social media presence and Aperture’s other activities

Qualifications:
• Experience in the following: online writing, editing, and blogging
• Experience in video and sound recording, editing, including podcasting
• Experience with still photography a plus
• Strong social media and SEO skills and experience
• Strong research, organizational, writing, and communication skills
• Basic understanding of HTML, Google Analytics and WordPress
• Interest in and/or experience with photography, New York cultural institutions, and art-related events

Please send cover letter and resume to newhire@aperture.org

New Year, 2010, © Jowhara AlSaud

Kicking off the 2012 art season, check out highlights on view throughout New York! See below for some of our favorite Aperture artists and galleries.

New Photographers at Dazinger Gallery, January 12–February 25, introducing five emerging photographers unlinked to one another through content but brought together for their first time exhibiting in New York City. Featured photographer Tereza Vlčkovà from Aperture’s groundbreaking book, reGeneration 2: tomorrow’s photographers today.

Silverstein Annual at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, January 14–February 25, offers exposure to ten up-and-coming photographers who have been chosen by ten prominent curators, including Nelli Palomaki, reGeneration 2 artist. View her limited edition prints available through Aperture.

Penetration at Foley Gallery, January 12–March 3, recreates the photographic image with five artists who interrupt the common photographic process. Portfolio Prize 2008 Runner-Up Jowhara AlSaud’s portraits of faceless figures, inspired by censorship, are personal photographs made into drawings etched on the surface of a negative, view her limited edition prints here. Pushing the capabilities of photographic paper itself, Marco Breuer scratches and scrapes the light-sensitive paper making conceptual, abstract imagery. See Breuer’s limited edition book by Aperture Early Recordings and Untitled 2007 and the highly acclaimed compilation The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, he was also featured in Aperture magazine issue 172.

Joel Sternfeld: First Pictures at Luhring Augustine, January 6–February 4, displays a selection of Joel Sternfeld’s earliest photographs, taken between 1971 and 1980, documenting his travels across America through vibrant colors twined with wit and satire.

Visions: Tim Hetherington at Bronx Documentary Center, through January 22, is the inaugural exhibit featuring photography and multimedia work produced by photojournalist Tim Hetherington who was killed in April of 2011 as he covered Libya’s revolution.

First Look at Yossi Milo Gallery, January 26–February 18, is the inaugural exhibition at the new gallery space located at 245 Tenth Avenue. The photographers included all had their first solo New York City exhibition presented by the Yossi Milo Gallery. These artists include Robert Bergman, Mohamed Bourouissa, Pieter Hugo, Simen Johan, Sze Tsung Leong, Loretta Lux, Yuki Onodera, Muzi Quawson, Mark Ruwedel, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Lise Sarfati, Alec Soth, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Liu Zheng. A celebration will be held in honor of these photographers on February 16 from 6:00–8:00 pm.

On Friday, January 13, The Tate Britian will host a symposia titled Landscape and Eschatology, the study of the apocalypse. This free one-day conference, organized by Joy Sleeman, UCL and John Timberlake, Middlesex University with the Tate Research Centre: British Romantic Art, brings together a range of high-profile artists and researchers to discuss the lasting cultural legacies of John Martin’s landscapes, and the relevance of themes of apocalypse both in Martin’s time and today.

Friday, January 13, 2012: 10:00 am-6:00 pm

Session 1: City and Apocalypse chaired by John Timberlake
11.00–11.30 Philip Shaw, University of Leicester, Embodied Violence: Turner, Terror and The Field of Waterloo
11.30–12.00 Chris Coltrin, Shepherd University, West Virginia The Wounded Landscape: the Politics of Urban Destruction in John Martin’s ‘Mesopotamian Trilogy’
12.00–12.30 Luke White, Middlesex University, Nature, the Metropolis and the Apocalyptic Sublime
12.30-1.00 Matthew Beaumont, UCL The Annihilated City: Pandemonium and the Utopian
1.00-2.00 lunch

Session 2: Landscape and Apocalypse chaired by Joy Sleeman
2.00–2.30 John Timberlake, Middlesex University Zones of Tension: Desertification and Despoilation in Frederick Sommer’s Arizona Photographs 1939-1945
2.30-3.00 Mathilde Nardelli UCL The Desert, Time and the End, c.1962-1975
3.00-3.30 John Beck, The Purloined Landscape: Militarised Space and Concealment as Spectacle
3.30-3.45 coffee break
3.45-4.30 Richard Misrach
4.30-5.15 Closing remarks

Richard Misrach Keynote speaker will be speaking on the apocolyptic nature in his work particularly in relation to his series and recently published book Destroy This Memory (Aperture, 2010), an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina. Taken in New Orleans between October and December 2005 in the wake of the storm, the photographs capture messages left behind by rescue workers and residents scrawled on roofs and walls, cars and trucks, fences and trees that reveal a range of individual reactions from despair to dark humor, giving a human face to the wreckage. Arranged in a powerful narrative sequence, the images express, in the artist’s words, “people pleading for help, then defending their turf, then suffering human loss, then animal loss, then despair, then humor, then anger at the political establishment, then anger at the insurance companies, and finally determination and hope to survive and perhaps recover.” Taken with a 4 MP pocket camera, the photographs are an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina as told by those on the ground, and seen through the lens of a contemporary master.

The Tate Britian Auditorium
Free, booking required
Tickets can be booked by calling 020 7887 8888.

More details here.

John Cyr is a Brooklyn-based photographer, master printer, and a graduate from SVA’s Photography MFA program. He began the Developer Tray series as his thesis project and has spent nearly two years shooting photographers’ developing trays all around the US. I spoke to John now that his project is nearing completion.

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Mark Cohen's Developer Tray. Photograph by John Cyr.

Paula Kupfer: Have you finished the project? And did you photograph sixty trays as you set out to do?

John Cyr: I’m definitely in the final stages, and past the sixty—I’m at sixty-five now. I have only a few more appointments set up. I’m very comfortable where the collection is. Now I’m figuring out how to take it into book form, and how much of the personal experience to include.

PK: It’s a fascinating part of the project.

JC: I get that a lot. People’s interest is piqued when they find out, for instance, that I went to Sally Mann’s farm and actually photographed the tray there.

PK: In this context, the photograph is the result of a long process, and there’s some mystery to it. Did you meet many of the photographers?

JC: There are a few that I never met, where l just dealt with their assistants. Others were mailed to me. But for at least eighty percent, I visited in person. Some were ten-minute talks; others, two-hour conversations. For instance, I had a great day with Larry Fink. I spent the day out on his farm, and stayed for dinner. He had peacocks running around, and an emu.

PK: You weren’t tempted to photograph the periphery—their houses or surroundings, or the photographers themselves?

JC: I only photographed with my cellphone. With every photographer that I approached, I made sure to be overly humble and gracious. I think that a lot of the reasons that well-known photographers accepted to participate was because it wasn’t so personal. Photographically, maybe. But I didn’t say, “I’d love to take a portrait of you while I’m there.”

I wanted to respect their privacy and not be aggressive. But I regret not recording anything while I was there, especially now, as I’m going back and trying to put the pieces together. I have notes, which are good, and I have my memory, but there’s a lot that’s lost in time.

PK: Do you consider this a greater reflection of the project? It deals with nostalgia and the past, and something that’s being lost…

JC: Yeah, that’s interesting, and a good way of putting it. This is what I’m trying to bring together for the book – the experience, the fleeting moments, the experience of going and meeting with these photographers.

PK: Do you think of the project as an archive?

JC: I do. And, as far as the archive goes, it almost heightens the fact that each of these objects is so physically beautiful—because of the colors, but also because it’s a picture of this object that has literally experienced the hands of the artist.

Personally, this project has the greatest sense of purpose within the history of photography, and the current state that we’re in. Not necessarily for representing a longing for silver printing, because it hasn’t disappeared, but just shifting from being almost the standard to being almost nonexistent.

PK: How do you relate this project to the rest of your work?

JC: I’m trying to figure that out. I’m interested in continuing to work on the idea of analogue photography. This project deals with the analogue process but they’re not analogue prints. I really want to get back into the darkroom with my own work. How it’s going to manifest itself, I don’t know yet.

I’m still happy about my previous, documentary work, but it was difficult to separate myself out from other work that people do at any given place/time. I think that this project has taken off so well because of its iconic imagery. If you see one tray, you remember the project. How I can possibly bring that to another body of work, I’m still figuring out. I don’t want to find myself falling into a trap of doing just that—isolating an object in the same way, showcasing it for the sake of its own personal history. I could go photograph typewriters of well-known writers, or recording instrument of old analog studios—it’s never-ending. But I don’t want to do that. I know that this was a shift from my previous work, and where it will go next, I don’t know yet. But it’s going to be different.

To learn more about John Cyr’s work, visit his website www.johncyrphotography.com.

Paula Kupfer is the editorial and circulation coordinator for Aperture magazine.