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

• LightBox presents an essay written by Tim Hetherington, who was featured in Aperture issue 204, from the new book Photographs Not Taken, one year after the photographer’s death in Libya. The collection, compiled by Will Steacy (one of Aperture’s Green Cart Commissioned photographers), also features essays by Roger Ballen, Ed Kashi, Mary Ellen Mark, Alec Soth, Peter van Agtmael and more. Additionally, PDN features an 8 image retrospective by Hetherington, whose work is now on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York (through May 12, 2012).
• This week in commentary: LPV Magazine  digests Instagram articles by Om Malik, the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch and New York Magazine’s Paul Ford, finds out, “Facebook Buys Instagram, Some Photographers Sad.” APhotoEditor reads Paul Melcher‘s poignant article on La Lettre de La Photographie alongside Marc Andreessen‘s WSJ piece “Software Will Eat The World,” and explores “how a company with 13 employees and no profits [Instagram] can replace a now bankrupt company [Kodak] that once employed over 120,000 people with annual sales of $10 billion as the ‘manufacturer’ of a device to bring photography to the masses.” In related news, NPPA opens a mobile phone photo contest, calling for entries through Sunday, April 22, 2012, while Magnum Photos has deployed another team to Rochester to document the once-vibrant home of Kodak as part of their Postcards From America series.
• Poynter investigates the controversy over the Pentagon delaying the LA Times from publishing photographs of US soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan corpses, a story which has since elicited over 2000 comments on the Times’ website.
• Sophie Calle, featured in Aperture issues 191 and 142, talks to the Guardian about her best shot from the series Voir La Mer, in which she “took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s, to see [the sea] for the first time.” She photographed them from behind so as to not obstruct their initial encounter, and she captured the entire process, including their reactions, on video. Her current exhibition, Historias de Pared (at Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín through June 3, 2012) is reviewed on Fototazo.
• In honor of Albert Hoffman’s infamous Bicycle Day (April 19), LIFE Magazine shares a number of never-before-published dream-like photographs that were to accompany an original 1966 article titled, “New Experience That Bombards the Senses: LSD Art.”
• American Suburb X shares journal entries from William Gedney on “Kentucky, Sex and Diane Arbus,” alongside scans of the archival material culled from the Duke University Rare Books and Manuscript Library.  Speaking of rare books, ICP Library profiles some of the innovative and experimental photobooks they found and photographed at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair last week.
• Time Magazine releases their annual list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World,” alongside a portrait gallery of 24 of the honorees.  Included this year is artist Christian Marclay, of the monumental video installation recently purchased by MoMA, The Clock, and the 2007 Aperture monograph Shuffle, which takes the form of a deck of cards. The Clock will be shown for free this summer from the middle of July to mid-August at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. Stake out your places now!

In conjunction with their 2012 Small Works National Competition, Soho Photo Gallery will present a guest exhibition curated by Aperture Foundation on the art of making small books. The opening reception is this Thurday, February 9 to celebrate  The Art of Small Books, in which we explore the intimacy gained from a journal-sized format.

Like novels or short-story collections, these books are meant for the reader to interact with, not simply to be viewed or put on display. Several included in this show take their form as a result of the artist coming to the table with a concept that hinges on the ability of the finished work to “pass” as—or at least refer to—something other than your typical coffee-table book: Christian Marclay’s Shuffle, which takes on the guise of a deck of cards; Takashi Homma’s Tokyo, the form of which gives a nod to the Penguin Classic pocket-size novel; Stanley Greene’s Black Passport, with its rounded corners and reference to the classic travel document. Even Martin and Munoz’s Travelers is kept within the confines of typical snow-globe scale.

The traditional publishing logic about smaller-size books has tended to revolve around practicality and affordability. So while there is much to be gained from trading the larger reproduction size of an over-sized book for a smaller-scale presentation, photographers who are accustomed to working with large-sized prints can be especially loathe to give up on scale as a way of presenting their work. What this exhibitions aims to show is that small can be beautiful, too.

The Clock, 2010 single-channel video, 24 hours, photo by Christian Marclay, courtesy the artist

On view through February 19, 2011

In The Clock, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time. While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.

Itself a varied part of this artist’s output in a wide range of media (which includes sculpture, photography, collage, painting and performance), Christian Marclay’s video work often takes the form of virtuosic audiovisual collages made from film fragments. Starting with Telephones (1995), a rhythmic montage of clips from Hollywood films showing characters engaged in phone conversations, and continuing with the celebrated multi-screen masterpieces Video Quartet (2002) and Crossfire (2007), Marclay has consistently mined our movie culture and re-contextualized its fragments into compelling sonic and visual wholes.

In Shuffle, published by Aperture, he has extensively photographed the appearance of musical notation in the world: on shop awnings, chocolate tins, T-shirts, underwear, and other unexpected places.

Click here to purchase Shuffle from Aperture!

Contemporary Artist Christian Marclay has been chosen as the fifteenth recipient of the Larry Aldrich Award a prize that every year honors an American artist whose work has had a significant impact on contemporary visual culture during recent years. He receives $25,000 and the opportunity for an exhibition at The Aldrich Museum in 2011. Christian Marclay’s visual art practice, which includes video installations, sculpture, photography and collage, reflects on the relationship between sound and image. His piece Double Doors (The Electic Chair) was part of an exhibition titled Voice and Void at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum as part of the 2006 Hall Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition.

Previous recipients of the Larry Aldrich Award include Elizabeth Peyton (2006), Kara Walker (2005), Catherine Opie (2004), David Hammons (2003), Fred Wilson (2002), Mark Dion (2001), Doug Aitken (2000), Janine Antoni (1999), Ann Hamilton (1998), Charles Ray (1997), Robert Gober (1996), Bruce Nauman (1995), Cindy Sherman (1994) and Elizabeth Murray (1993).

Shuffle is another Marclay project available through Aperture which also addresses the ways that music and sound impact our experience of the world.