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

• Art Nouveau magazine interviews artist Hank Willis Thomas, of the monograph Pitch Blackness (Aperture 2008) whose transmedia installation Question Bridge: Black Males is still on view at three different locations around the country, on his latest body of work Strange Fruit which makes ”vivid comparisons of black perception between the pre-slavery era and post-Civil Rights Movement.”
• Joerg Colberg posts on Conscientious Extended about “How To Make a Photobook,” though he admits early on, “My headline is slightly disingenuous: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making.”
• New York Times‘ Lens blog does a Q&A with Mexico City-based photographer Dominic Bracco II about one of his images “showing death with humanity and dignity,” as well as the Eugene Richards’ photograph from the series “Below the Line: Living Poor in America,” which inspired him.
• Jess Dudley, Wonderful Machine Producer, posts a very informative piece on APhotoEditor, “Pricing and Negotiating – Non-Fiction Book Cover,” in an attempt to elucidate the often murky realm of reproduction rights through a real-life annecdote.
• New Yorker‘s Photobooth profiles “Lost & Found: Salvaging Snapshots in Japan,” with a slideshow of the recovered family photographs from the Japanese town of Yamamoto devastated by the tsunami one year ago, featured in Aperture issue 206, and on view at Aperture Gallery April 2, 2012 – April 27, 2012.
• Time’s Lightbox profiles the independent photo project on Afghanistan (Danger and Aftermath, on view at Museum London in Southwestern Ontario through April 1, 2012),  by Magnum photographer Larry Towell, who’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) and Access to Life (Aperture/Magnum Photos/The Global Fund 2009).
• NPR’s The Picture Show takes “A Peak Inside the Copy Cat Building: Where Baltimore Artists Work – And Live.” Alex Wein and Rob Brulinski’s photographs portray the living spaces of over 100 eclectic new tenants of a building which once housed Copy Cat printing, and was the birthplace of the Crown Cork bottle cap, “a worldwide standard for the beer and soda industries.”

“Sisyphus with Leica,” Alex Webb termed himself in three words for a Q&A with the UK Telegraph last year. The renowned Magnum photographer known for his evocative color street photos—work that he’s repeatedly called 99%, “if not more, about failure,”—will be at Aperture on Friday signing books and presenting a co-lecture with his wife and creative partner, Rebbecca Norris Webb, or “maker of books,” as she described herself for that same Q&A. The free event will take place on the first night of their SOLD OUT weekend photography workshop.

His latest monograph The Suffering of Light, published by Aperture in spring of 2011, is a retrospective of his 30-year “photographic dialogue with the streets,” he tells the Times.  Making the book, he realized, “could be a way to explore the dominant obsession of my photographic life,” he writes, “a particular way of seeing in color… inexplicable, intuitive.”  This obsession, along with his acute sense for the rhythm of the streets has manifested itself through a tremendous body of work.

Webb recalls being originally inspired to engage with the life in public spaces as a teenager seeing for the first time the Chicago series by Ray Metzker titled “My Camera and I in the Loop” in an issue of Aperture magazine–something he paid homage to in color late last year. As he matured, however, he increasingly became drawn to places that have more evident “sociopolitical tensions,” borders and boundaries of societies, and began wandering extensively through the streets of Haiti, Mexico, Istanbul and the like. Still, he wouldn’t approach these places as a “traditional photojournalist.” Instead, his ramblings have resulted in a stunning blend of art photography and documentation.

“I’m looking for photos that have a greater level of ambiguity,” he tells the Times. “It’s more a matter of questioning or enigma than we usually associate with photojournalism, whatever that is. I’m looking for photos that ask questions. I’m not sure I’m able to provide an answer, but you ask a lot of good questions.”

Lately, he’s expressed interest in returning to the United States to photograph and produce a body of work that’s closer to home. “Though it is at this point very much in a state of infancy,” he told Leica Camera blog, he and his wife “are exploring the notion of creating another joint project.”

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb Artist Talk and Book Signing
Friday, March 23, 2012 at 7:00 PM

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

San Francisco, California, 2000 © Jim Goldberg (cover Aperture magazine issue 187)

Congratulations to Jim Goldberg for winning the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize! Goldberg was nominated for his exhibition Open See at the Photographers’ Gallery, London this past year.

Goldberg’s work was featured on the cover of Aperture magazine issue 187 as part of an article on Sixty Years of Magnum, by Gerry Badger.

© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

Josef Koudelka‘s exhibition coproduced by Aperture and Magnum Photos, Invasion 68: Prague is now on view in Argentina at the Fundacion OSDE.  The remarkable photographs were taken during one week in August of 1968, which capture the Soviet-led invasion of Prague.  Koudelka took to the streets to document this critical moment. His powerful photographs reached Magnum Photos in New York and earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. This exhibition, with many images—reproduced in large-scale prints and grids—never having been seen before, as well as compelling texts by Czech historians.

Invasion 68 Prague
August 5 – October 2, 2010

Espacio de Art de Fundación OSDE
Suipacha 658 – 1er piso
Microcentro
Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Click here to purchase Koudelka’s Aperture published monograph, Invasion 68: Prague.

Click here for more information about Fundacion OSDE

Magnum Holiday Book Party

Book signing and Reception
Monday, December 15, 2008, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

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

FREE

Join Aperture Monday evening as we host the Magnum Holiday Book Party, with over twenty Magnum photographers including Elliott Erwitt, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paul Fusco, Larry Towell, Martine Franck, Paolo Pellegrin, Richard Kalvar, Mark Power, Peter Marlow, and many more. Limited-edition prints, rare and new books will be available for purchase. A special gift book by Alec Soth is included with every purchase.