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

• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth, APhotoEditor and many others track Magnum’s latest expedition, “House of Photos,” an archival collaboration by photographers Martin Parr, Alex Webb, Larry Towell, Bruce Gilden, Jim Goldberg, Alec Soth and five others, similar to their recent “Postcards From America” series.  Eleven Magnum photographers have been exploring Rochester, NY, the birthplace of Kodak on the eve of the company’s demise, each in their own particular style, posting regular updates to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. Find more background on the project in a Q&A with Martin Parr.
• Photo District News reminds us all about worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, which falls on this Sunday, April 29, 2012, and shares a selection of seven pinhole camera-made images, encouraging readers to submit their own. Grab an empty oatmeal can and learn how to make your own pinhole camera from Kodak.
• This week, PhotoShelter Blog compiles a list of “The 40+ Items Every Photography Assistant Needs Now,” including some not so obvious ones like Tums, a blow drier, and Tylenol. The article is just one small part of their new 44-page downloadable Photo Assistant’s Handbook which covers among other things, “12 Problems that Photo Assistants are Expected to Solve.”
• The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi investigates the sudden disappearance of Vogue’s highly controversial profile of Syria’s first lady from the Conde Naste publication’s website; a profile accompanied by images shot by war photographer James Nachtwey.
• On Tuesday, the NYC Department of Records announced the official debut of a public online archive containing an astounding 870,000 photographs of New York City. Unfortunately, “due to overwhelming demand,” and server maintenance, we didn’t get to see the images just yet, but Associated Press did. The Atlantic‘s Alan Taylor did too, and culled through the archive posting 53 of their favorites. While they work out the kinks in their system, you can still check out the work of Eugene de Salignac in New York Rises (2007), a copublication with the Municipal Archives (now part of the Department of Records). This book offers a peek into one small part of the City’s amazing archive — a selection of images de Salignac shot while working for NYC’s Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures from 1906 – 1934.
• Time‘s LightBox announce the 2012 Overseas Press Club Award winners André Liohn, David Guttenfelder, and Pete Muller with a slideshow of 50 images, and a profile for each. They also post an exclusive on the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards winner, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs by Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis, from Getty Publications.
• Fototazo opens up an extensive two-day conversation on “The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography.” An image from Richard Mosse’s Infra was among the many used to illustrate.  The monograph (Aperture 2011/12) was also included in The New York Times‘ round-up of “Vivid Guides to Unfamiliar Landscapes” and was nominated by Rob Hornstra as one of the best books of this past year at the International Photobook Festival.

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

• Time’s Lightbox profiles ‘Act’: Meditations on the Disabled Body by Denis Darzacq, a two-year project of photographing “people who have had trouble finding a place in society from the beginning of their lives,” he says. The Paris-based photographer known for his high-energy images and dynamic subjects will be giving an artist talk at Aperture this Monday, April 16, 2012 at 6:30 pm, FREE.
• Kathy Ryan, editor of The New York Times Magazine Photographs, shares the fascinating backstory of a photograph of Mohammad Ali with his future wife Lonnie that ran in the Sunday Magazine, taken at “the moment Cassius and I met,”  Lonnie wrote in an email to the photographer, Steve Schapiro.
• The New Yorker‘s photo department shares a collection of reader-submitted, “Hand-Picked Instagrams,” (as Wall Street Journal did last week, and more publications probably will in the future) alongside a thought-provoking essay by Ian Crouch, “Instagram’s Instant Nostalgia.” This, in the same week New York Times’ Bits Blog reports Facebook will buy Instagram for $1 billion.
• The British Journal of Photography reports on a controversial ad campaign for photographers’ rights launched by the French organization Union des Photographes Professionnels – Auteurs. In related news this week, the American Society of Media Photographers has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, PetaPixel reports, for “scanning, indexing, and storing copyright work without permission of the copyright holders” for their ambitions Google Books project.
• DIY gallerists take note: Phototuts+ shares “An Expert Guide to Matting and Framing a Photo,” which should be useful after you’ve watched their video lecture on Ansel Adams–delivered by Allan Ross who was Adams’ darkroom assistant for many years–and printed a bunch of restrained, expertly metered black-and-white landscape photographs of your own.
• American Suburb X shares a number of Nan Goldin readings this week, including an essay by Nan on actress and close friend Cookie Mueller who died of AIDS in 1989, as well as a fascinating in-depth paper by Mihaela Precup, “The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning.” All great reads; our only quibble is: where did they come from? [UPDATE: ASX has appended the source of one of the pieces, created originally by Dirck Halstead at the once-pioneering web journal digitaljournalist.org]
• The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announce their 2012 Fellowships in photography, PDN Pulse reports. Ten photographers, including Doug Dubois of the monograph All the Days and Nights, and John Gossage, whose exhibition The Pond and a Little Romance opens today in Chicago, join the ranks of past recipients Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Richard Mosse, Brian Ulrich, and Penelope Umbrico.

All photography is a kind of step away from reality. Few photographers within the documentary genre have gone further to embrace this notion than Richard Mosse, whose current photo project exploring armed conflict in the eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Richard Mosse: Infra, opens today at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

“Documentary photography is now at the moment where it has to change,” says Mosse. “It is behind the times – the forms of modern conflict are profoundly complex; their narratives are impossibly difficult to convey.”

Investigating a fresh form to represent the continued hostilities surrounding the deadliest war in human history—a very old and ongoing conflict that had gone stale in popular consciousness—Mosse toured eastern Congo between 2010-11, armed with two cameras and a supply of Kodachrome film, rendering the characters of this war in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. The tension between the hot pink-tinted worlds rendered on film and the devastating subject of the photography is what makes Mosse’s work so compelling. In taking a step away from the standard visual language of photojournalism, Mosse is producing unimaginable images that effectively underscore the truly unimaginable reality of the conflict they capture, a modern conflict too opaque for standard methods of representation.

»Read Richard Mosse’s interview with Liverpool Daily Post on his Infra series and exhibition
»Watch Richard Mosse discuss the stories behind Infra, and preview the Open Eye Gallery installation

Richard Mosse: Infra will be on view March 30 through June 10, 2012

Open Eye Gallery
Liverpool, United Kingdom
+44 (0) 151 236 6768

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Also consider Richard Mosse’s first book, Infra: Photographs by Richard Mosse (Aperture 2012), or a limited edition print from the Infra series, “Debris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011″

Richard Mosse is also featured in Aperture Magazine # 203, “Richard Mosse: Sublime Proximity interview with Aaron Schuman”

Armory Week is almost here. Join us on Saturday, March 10 for our annual all-day Armory Collectors Brunch to mix and mingle with friends and colleagues in the heart of Chelsea’s art district. The event will include a special walk through of the current exhibition Shared Vision, with Marcelle Polednik, Director MOCA Jacksonville and collectors Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla at 11:00 am, followed by book signings with Aperture artists including Bruce Davidson, Richard Mosse, Brian Ulrich, Penelope Umbrico, collector Bill Hunt.

Saturday, March 10, 10:00 am–1:00 pm
FREE

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

During Armory Arts Week, you can also visit Aperture at the eleventh annual SCOPE New York Art Fair. You can see some of our newest limited-edition prints from artists Hank Willis Thomas’ “After Identity, What?, 2011,” Lars Tunbjork’s “42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, from the Times Square portfolio published May 18, 1997” and Richard Mosse’s “Débris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011.”

This year, SCOPE’s VIP first view will take place on Wednesday, March 7 at an exciting, high profile location across from The Armory Show. The 35,000 square foot pavilion and its dramatic glass box entrance on 57th Street and 12th Ave will host 50 international galleries and museum-quality programming highlighting groundbreaking, emerging work in contemporary art and beyond.

First View:
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
3:00 pm–9:00 pm

Fair Continues:
Thursday, March 8, 2012-Sunday, March 11, 2012

Admission required.

SCOPE Pavilion
57th St & 12th Avenue
New York, NY 10019
212-268-1522

Join us on Monday, March 5, 2012 at 6:30 pm at Aperture Gallery for an artist talk with photographer Richard Mosse , followed by a book signing and reception for his new book Infra.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Over the course of two years, Mosse documented the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo using a discontinued type of color infrared surveillance film called Kodak Aerochrome to offer a stunning and radical rethinking of how to depict a complex and intractable conflict.  With film that is extra sensitive to green light, he renders the rich typography of the country as well as the camouflage of the Congolese army and combative rebel groups in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.

This is Mosse’s first monograph, co-published by Aperture and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.  These improbably colored images underline the growing tension between art, fiction, and traditional photojournalism as a way of portraying and communicating the impact of war. Mosse states that the collection works “through shocks to the imagination,” using photography’s unique ability “to make visible what cannot be perceived.”

Select large format prints from the collection are currently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC through April 15, organized by Xandra Eden, Curator of Exhibitions.

Weatherspoon Art Museum
500 Tate St
Greensboro, NC 27412
336-334-5770

Mosse’s limited edition print “Débris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo,” is also now available for purchase at Aperture. Mosse calls the ethereal shot a “surprising” double-exposure that came about by accident in March 2011. “‘Débris ‘pushed me to embrace failure and let go of certain ways of seeing.”

Photographs by Richard Mosse have been featured on the cover of Aperture magazine #203.

Colonel Soleil’s Boys, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010) © Richard Mosse

SCOPE Pavilion
Wynwood Arts District
NE 1st Avenue (Midtown Blvd), at NE 30th Street
Miami, Florida
(212) 268-1522

Join Aperture Foundation at SCOPE Miami! Now in its eleventh year, the art fair will present the best of cutting edge contemporary art in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District. Aperture will be joining 80 international galleries to show our very best books and limited editions, including work by artists Penelope Umbrico and Richard Mosse.

Aperture recently published Penelope Umbrico’s book Penelope Umbrico (photographs), which offers a radical re-interpretation of everyday consumer and vernacular images. Richard Mosse was featured in Aperture magazine #203, Summer 2011. His work will also be showcased in the upcoming book Infra and the very special collector’s edition of the publication. His limited-edition print Débris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011 will also be featured. Look for these artists and much more fantastic work at Aperture’s booth.

The fair will take place from Tuesday, November 29, 2011–Sunday, December 4, 2011. Tickets are required.

Tuesday, 4:00 pm–8:00 pm (VIP and press)
Wednesday–Saturday, 11:00 am–7:00 pm
Sunday, 11:00 am–6:00 pm

Saturday, December 3, 4:00 – 5:00 pm
In Conversation: Penelope Umbrico and Brian Ulrich
Soho Beach House
RSVP@aperture.org

Sunday, December 4, 2:00 pm
Infra: Richard Mosse Book Signing
SCOPE Pavilion, booth B31

Issue 203 features:

Richard Mosse, featured on the Summer cover, negotiates the boundaries of documentary image making

Daido Moriyama discusses a lifetime of work

Mark Alice Durant on Hans- Peter Feldmann’s troves of images

British photographer Helen Sear fuses process and subject

Mo Yi captures street life in China’s cities

Emerging South African photographer Lindeka Qampi

Paolo Ventura’s recent project “Venice 1943”

Click here to subscribe now and get a FREE book!

We are pleased to announce some the participating artists included in Slideluck Potshow XIV, Friday evening at Aperture Gallery:

Abelardo Morell, Alexander Gronsky, Amelie Escher, Andrew Dosunmu, Andrew Hetherington, Andrew Moore/Yancey Richardson, Birthe Piontek, Chuck Close, David Maisel, Filippo Mutani, Francois Robert, Harri Kallio, James Worrell, Jeff Harris, Jon Feinstein, Jonathan Torgovnik/MediaStorm, Jowhara AlSaud, Kent Rogowski, Lori Nix, Mathieu Laverdière, Mashid Mohadjerin, Narinda Reeders, Nora Herting, Paolo Woods, Richard Mosse, S. Billie Mandle, Sara Terry, Sarah Hughes, Sophia Wallace, Tiffany Walling & John McGarity, Todd Fisher, Vincent Laforet, Yoav Galai/100 Eyes, Yvonne Venegas, and Zack Seckler!

Tickets $10 – Click here to order or purchase at the door. Proceeds to benefit both Slideluck Potshow and Aperture Foundation.

As beverages will be provided, bring your favorite potluck dish! Also accepting canned food donations to local food drive.

Slideluck Potshow XIV:Inside Out
Friday, November 13, 7:00 pm
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555