Since its creation in 1952, Aperture magazine has always given a voice to those who made and work in photography. Inspired by the sixty-fifth anniversary of its creation, Aperture is publishing a collection of more than seventy interviews published since 1985: from Henri Cartier-Bresson to William Klein, from Quentin Bajac to Barbara Kruger.
The form of the interview is a way of speaking directly to an artist, of understanding the intentions, of seeing the work process, of casting an eye behind the scenes. Some questions are inevitable and recur like a haunting refrain: when? why? how? These question-and-answer exercises clarify the motivations and also get to the heart of approach of both theorists and practitioners of photography. Yet, behind this somewhat conventional work, the limits of the genre and of the intended biological narrative are noticeable. Each artist has internal thoughts, drawn from a life lived and experienced but it’s clear that the work is also an escape. It’s this gap between the intention of the image, the image itself and what is seen that gives each of these interviews its own individual flavour.
It’s also undoubtedly in the title of the collection, Conversations, that we have to look for meaning. On reading, we pass from one person to the other without any link other than photography that unites everyone, and the alphabetical order chosen intentionally by the editor, Melissa Harris. From the beginning, the dialogue establishes itself as less between the interviewer and the interviewee than between the interviewees themselves. It’s a pleasure to pass from one to the other, to compare their approaches and their intuitions, to confront them, to appreciate them together and in their own uniqueness. It’s less the photographers than contemporary photography itself that is read.
Hugo Fortin
Hugo Fortin is an author specialising in photography based in New York, in the USA.
Aperture Conversations: 1985 to present
Published by Aperture
$35,00
