Aperture Gallery was abuzz Wednesday evening, hosting the much-anticipated New York City launch of Delpire & Co., the citywide, multi-venue retrospective of the life and work of legendary editor, curator and publisher, Robert Delpire. Following presentations in Arles and Paris, Delpire & Co. arrives to New York City with representation at six venues throughout Manhattan.

Aperture’s Wednesday opening was the first of the week (followed by Thursday night openings at the French Embassy, and Gallery at Hermes), welcoming a strong roster of photography legends and pillars of the photographic community. Sarah Moon, Mary Ellen Mark, and Josef Koudelka were in attendance, standing alongside their own seminal works on view, as well as celebrated photographers Bruce Davidson and Susan Meiselas. Multiple films by filmmaker/photographer Sarah Moon were on screen, including 1970’s TV spots directed by Moon for Cacharel (7 min), as well as “Le Montreur d’images (The Go-Between)” (2009), her feature length documentary on husband Robert Delpire.

Peter Barberie, Curator of Photographs for the Philadelphia Art Museum was in attendance Wednesday evening, as well as Jeff Hirsch of FotoCare, and Wendy Byrne, former designer for Aperture Foundation. Special thanks to exhibition producer Mike Derez, and Project Coordinator Agnès Gagnès of Idéodis.

Delpire & Co. runs through June at venues throughout the city. Like us on Facebook to view a full album of photos from the opening.

›› Click here for details on all the exhibitions and events.
›› Join the conversation on Instagram and Twitter using #Delpire
›› The New Yorker presents a stunning and concise slideshow summary of books and photographs from among the displays at Aperture, Hermès, Pace/MacGill, and Howard Greenberg.

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

• The New York Times covers Mary Ellen Mark’s series Prom, first featured in Aperture issue 187, now a monograph by Getty Publications, and shares a trailer from Martin Bell’s accompanying documentary. The Sunday Review publishes an essay by Mark, “Prom Night,” and posts a slideshow of images from the series. LensBlog follows up with a Q&A with the photographer on shooting with one of five existing, finicky, but rewarding 20×24 Polaroid Land Cameras for this series and her earlier monograph Twins (Aperture 2005).
• In their weekly Modern Art Notes Podcast, ArtInfo‘s Tyler Green talks to Mitch Epstein, who he calls “one of America’s most prominent and most honored photographers,” about shifting focus from American Power to trees in New York City, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea. Epstein will be in conversation with Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla of the Shared Vision collection at Aperture on Wednesday, April 11, 2012.
• “Is your phone’s camera the only camera you need?” asks the Wall Street Journal, profiling new apps and accessories that make that possible. They also share cell phone snapshots by professional photojournalists, and invite readers to do the same.
• “In an environment where seconds count, there are glorious triumphs and heartbreaking defeats,” writes Michael M. Grynbaum for LensBlog on staff photographer Richard Perry‘s hectic images from the New York City subway. Can’t help but think back to Bruce Davidson’s series from the 1980s and resulting monograph Subway (Aperture 2011), save for the striking dissimilarities between now vastly different transit systems.
• Simon Bray shares a few key points on Phototuts+ on “Why Returning To A Photographic Location Is Such A Good Idea,” whether it’s months, weeks, days, or hours apart. It’s something Richard Misrach did when he began a three year project photographing the same scene from his from porch at all hours of the day for the monograph Golden Gate, which is soon to be released by Aperture as a stunning 16×20″ oversized edition.
• Fototazo interviews Luca Desienna, Chief Editor of Gomma Magazine, on the occasion of the announcement of the eight winners of the call for entries for their exciting new publication of black and white photography MONO, Volume 1 (November 2012). Lightbox at Time shares a slideshow of images by the winners and explains briefly what entailed Gomma’s “search for the best  new black-and-white photographers.”
• The National Press Photographers Association launched a new blog, Ethics Matters, opening up the often circular discussion on how much image manipulation is too much, focusing specifically on new HDR technology which allows cameras to combine multiple frames into a single image, often for a more saturated color effect. This, as Aperture is in the process of acquiring a HDR camera for our own digital media reporting purposes. Stay tuned!

Looking for a Valentine’s day gift for your sweetie?  Why not the beautiful limited edition photograph by Bruce Davidson from his 1980 series Subway, reissued last fall. Untitled, (couple on platform) depicts a public display of personal affection in stunning Kodachrome color–one of his rare forays outside of black and white film.

In this video clip for Aperture, Davidson explains that for the longest time he “found that mostly color is gratuitous, because we have it.”  When he began the project, for about half the time he was shooting in black and white. At one point, he says, “something came over me,” and he loaded that legendary, now-discontinued color film.

To capture the cultural fabric of New York City at that particular time, he needed the extremes of color. “The people in the subway,” he says, “their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other.”

Buy the print here for your sweetheart!

Last Monday, Aperture’s 2011 Benefit, Auction & SNAP! Party honored three incredibly influential figures: Bruce Davidson, Gerhard Steidl and Robert Anthione. The night had a warm and exciting atmosphere and our guests enjoyed looking at and bidding on plenty of amazing photography. In addition to the Live Auction conducted by Sotheby’s very own Denise Bethel, there was also a Silent Auction, and an Emerging Artists SNAP! Silent Auction. Aperture couldn’t have pulled this fabulous night off without the tireless support of our Board of Trustees, Benefit cochairs  Sondra Gilman, Susan Gutfreund, and Karl Lagerfeld; Auction cochairs Cathy Kaplan, Anne Stark, and Severn Taylor; and SNAP! Party cochairs artist Jowhara AlSaud, Peter Berberian of Gotham Imaging, Emily Bierman of Sotheby’s, and actor Ken Triwush. Thank you to all our generous supporters who contributed to the success of our most important fundraiser of the year!

Auction cochair Anne Stark, Aperture Chairman Celso Gonzalez-Falla, guests, Honorees Gerhard Steidl and Robert Anthoine, Benefit cochair Sondra Gilman, and Honoree Bruce Davidson.

Aperture’s Executive Director Chris Boot welcomes honorees Gerhard Steidl, Robert Anthoine, and Bruce Davidson.

Honoree Gerhard Steidl with Benefit cochair Susan Gutfreund.

Auction cochair Cathy Kaplan and guest.

Peter MacGill, Lesley A. Martin, guest, Mark Levine, and Fred Smith.

Muna Rihani, Chairman Emeritus John H. Gutfreund, guest, and Benefit cochair Susan Gutfreund.

Rachel Rimsky and SNAP! Party cochair Emily Bierman.

Alyse Archer-Coité, guest and artist Rachel Barrett enjoying the SNAP! Benefit Party.

Boys at the Lake, Central Park (1992) © Bruce Davidson/Howard Greenberg Gallery

Don’t miss out on our 2011 Benefit, Auction, and SNAP! Party! Taking place on Monday, October 17, the evening will begin with a cocktail reception and silent auction of classic and contemporary photographs. Then, a dinner, brief award ceremony, and live auction conducted by Denise Bethel, Senior Vice President and Director of Photographs, Sotheby’s. Finishing the night, there will be a Benefit Party hosted by SNAP! New Collectors Program.

Come mingle with fellow photography lovers and celebrate Aperture Foundation. We look forward to having you join us for this special event!

Click here for tickets and more information on our 2011 Benefit & Auction

Click here for tickets and more information on our 2011 SNAP! Benefit Party

© Bruce Davidson/Aperture Foundation

Accompanying the re-release of Bruce Davidson‘s classic book Subway, NPR’s WNYC has organized a project that will make your commute a little more interesting. The Brian Lehrer Show is asking listeners to submit their most iconic subway shots to feature online and on-air, and to be seen by legendary photography Bruce Davidson. So whether you take the Tube or the T, be sure to send in your interpretations of the teeming, vibrant, transportation systems that criss-cross our urban environments.

You can submit your subway photographs here. You can also see a gallery of submissions here.

Deadline for submission is 11:59pm on Sunday, October 16th.

Need some inspiration? Check out the new edition of Bruce Davidson’s Subway. Or head over to Aperture Gallery & Bookstore to see Bruce Davidson: Subway, an exhibition of the striking color photographs. Aperture will also be hosting a very special Artist Talk & Book Signing with Bruce Davidson later this month.

Exhibition on view:
Monday, October 3–Saturday, October 29, 2011
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 13, 2011
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Artist Talk & Book Signing:
Wednesday, September 26, 2011
8:30 pm

Aperture Bookstore & Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor
New York, New York 10001
Monday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm

© Magnum/Bruce Davidson

In 1986, Aperture first published Bruce Davidson‘s Subway—a ground-breaking series that has garnered critical acclaim both as a document of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City as well as for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin. In Davidson’s own words, “the people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other.”

Accompanying the third edition of this classic of photographic literature, Aperture Gallery will present Subway, an exhibition of the iconic color images that move the viewer through a landscape at times menacing, at other times lyrical, soulful, and satiric. The images include the full panoply of New Yorkers—from weary straphangers and languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators and the homeless.

There will also be a Talk and Book Signing event at Strand Books on Monday, September 26, 2011. Buying a copy of the new edition of Subway, or a $10 Strand gift card will get you into the event. Although tickets are sold out online, more tickets will be sold at the door the night of the signing.

Bruce Davidson (born in Oak Park, Illinois, 1933) is considered one of America’s most influential documentary photographers. He began taking photographs when he was ten, and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Yale University School of Design. In 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos, and in 1962, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to document the civil rights movement. After a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963, followed by a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1967, Davidson spent two years photographing in East Harlem, resulting in East 100th Street. In 1980, after living in New York City for twenty-three years, Davidson began his startling color essay of urban life in Subway. Davidson received a second National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980, and an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998. His work has been shown at the International Center of Photography, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum de Tokyo, Paris; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum Rattu, Arles, France; Burden Gallery (Aperture), New York; Parco Gallery, Tokyo; and New-York Historical Society.

Exhibition on view:
Tuesday, October 4, 2011–Saturday, October 29, 2011

Opening reception:
Thursday, October 13, 2011, 6:00 pm

Artist Talk:
Wednesday, October 26, 2011, 6:30 pm

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

BBVenice_5.26.11_3851 (2009-11) © Doug and Mike Starn

The 2011 Benefit Patrons’ Weekend on October 15 & 16 features many exciting and exclusive activities including a day trip to Beacon with a director-led tour of Dia:Beacon by Susan Batton and a tour of Doug and Mike Starn‘s laboratory studio at the former Tallix foundry spectacular space! The Starn’s moved to this studio to make the first Big Bambú experiment. This piece is formed by a network of more than 2,000 bamboo poles lashed together and is 40′ across 80 feet long and 50′ high. This installation creates a compelling dialogue with some of their current and early works articulated throughout the working space.

Shown above is a photograph of the Brother’s installation in progress, at the 54th Venice Biennale (May/June 2011). This original artwork is included in our Benefit Live Auction. In Venice, the Starns created a 50′ tall hollow tower of bamboo with a trail within its walls spiraling up to the top. The artists used as stem-cells, some fragments of their installation “Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop,” which grew over 6 months on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer. That exhibition had ranked 4th in the world in 2010 for total attendance of contemporary art exhibitions and was the 9th most attended exhibition in the Museum’s history. Throughout the Met exhibit, the Starns and their crew of rock climbers continuously lashed and sculpted over 7,000 bamboo poles, a performative architecture of randomly interconnected vectors forming a section of a seascape with a 70-foot cresting wave above Central Park. Big Bambú suggests the complexity and energy of an ever-growing and changing living organism.

Doug and Mike Starn are identical twin American artists. First receiving international attention at the 1987 Whitney Biennial, the Starns are primarily known for working conceptually with photography for the past two and a half decades. They are largely concerned with chaos, interconnection and interdependence, time, and physics, and they continue defying categorization, effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines such as photography, sculpture, architecture and site-specific projects. The Starns were represented by Leo Castelli from 1989 until his death in 1999. Their art has been the object of numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. They have received many honors including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1995; The International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography in 1992; and, artists in residency at NASA in the mid-1990′s.

Click here for more information and to buy tickets to our 2011 Benefit & Auction

Click here to view our auction catalog and to bid online

Boys at the Lake, Central Park, 1992 © Bruce Davidson/Howard Greenberg Gallery

Benefit Honoree Bruce Davidson‘s photograph Boys at the Lake, Central Park is one of the many exciting items up for auction at this year’s Benefit. The black and white image depicts four boys climbing on overhanging branches, starkly silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline. The photographer writes, of the image, “I discovered these young children swinging on low branches of trees over the lake. They seemed very free to me and comfortable as I made a few panoramic exposures. I thanked them and continued walking along.”

“The layers of life are very deep within Central Park, and no one will ever finish photographing Central Park. [...] I used a panoramic camera with a rotating drum scan for much of the work in the park because Olmstead saw the park as a proscenium that moved, like during a carriage ride, or strolling, so I needed that 150 degree view.”

Bruce Davidson (born in Oak Park, Illinois, 1933) is considered one of America’s most influential photographers. He began taking photographs when he was ten, and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Yale University School of Design. In 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos, and in 1961 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to document the civil rights movement. After a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, followed by a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1967, Davidson spent two years photographing one block in East Harlem, resulting in East 100th Street. A solo exhibition of this work was curated by John Szarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. In 1980, after living in New York City for twenty-three years, Davidson began his startling color series of urban life in Subway. Davidson received a second National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980, and an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998. He received this year an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the International Center of Photography, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum Reattu, Arles, France; Burden Gallery (Aperture), New York; Parco Gallery, Tokyo; and New-York Historical Society.

Click here to preview artworks from the Auction and to bid online

Click here to purchase tickets to the Benefit and for more information

Click here to see Bruce Davidson’s new edition of his classic book Subway, to be published by Aperture this Fall

Aperture magazine Co-Publisher Dana Triwush with Sylvia Plachy

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A full house within the Levi’s© Photo Workshop on Thursday evening was expanded by over 30,000 people on Facebook who experienced Bruce Davidson’s guided tour through his last 50 years of photography. The Q&A portion of the evening was lively, with Workshop programming director Emma Reeves fielding questions both in person and online. Bruce has clearly influenced many generations of photographers, and it was wonderful to see a vibrant and diverse crowd gathering to celebrate him and his work. After a brief book signing the Workshop staff presented Bruce with a Falcon candid camera from their vintage camera rentals area, which he’d told them was one of the first cameras he ever used. He’s tracking down film for it now, always in pursuit of the next photograph.

Slideshow photographs courtesy of Brandon Remler.