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In the photography world, the Aperture Foundation holds a singular place. Founded in 1952, Aperture originally started as a quarterly creative photography journal. As time went on Aperture became a non-profit organization and expanded its scope to include lecture forums, limited edition prints and portfolios, gallery exhibitions, book publishing, and more. The avowed purpose of Aperture has always been to promote the advancement of high quality photography, and it fulfills its charter well; the Foundation’s longevity, growth, and reputation speak literally volumes. |
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Milton Fletcher is director and curator of CyberGallery66.org.
Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Traveler 132 at Night, from Travelers, 2004. Published by Aperture, October 2008.
In the photography world, the Aperture Foundation holds a singular place. Founded in 1952, Aperture originally started as a quarterly creative photography journal. As time went on Aperture became a non-profit organization and expanded its scope to include lecture forums, limited edition prints and portfolios, gallery exhibitions, book publishing, and more. The avowed purpose of Aperture has always been to promote the advancement of high quality photography, and it fulfills its charter well; the Foundation’s longevity, growth, and reputation speak literally volumes.
Part of Aperture’s success is its willful diversity, and that is amply apparent in its upcoming fall 2008 book releases. Some are of historical import (Susan Meiselas’ Nicaragua, Josef Koudelka’s Invasion 68: Prague), while others reflect contemporary concerns (Street Art, Street Life; Jonas Bendiksen’s The Places We Live) and still more explore personal obsessions (Martin Parr’s two-volume Parrworld: Objects and Postcards and Jock Sturges’ Misty Dawn: Portrait of a Muse).
Aperture’s book publisher, Lesley A. Martin, explains the basic criteria that is used in deciding what to publish: “We look for work that really has something to say, that is very consistent, well developed, challenging, and will operate well in the book format. We will take a gamble in a way that a lot of publishers might not be able to, in part because of our not-for-profit status. We can find ways to make it work.”
An intriguing example of Aperture’s progressive approach to publishing is the upcoming release of the book Travelers, a selected collection of photographs of visual artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz’s self-made snow globes “Travelers” series and the micro-scale “Islands” panorama series. Travelersis compelling because its visual scenarios are consistently foreboding and disturbing (typical pictures: a naked little boy leading a small group of adults through a blizzard, a couple dancing on top of a grave in a snow covered cemetery, figures flying off cliffs). The artists have gutted the innocence of snow globes and child-like panoramas and reinvented them as portals to dark fantasies, sort of like dream or fairytale settings gone dangerously awry. As Martin describes them, “They’re sketches and often they’re based on a movie, or part of a movie, something we saw on the street, something we saw in a book, and it’s a riff on something.”
Muñoz adds, “There are story lines that run through some of the globes that connect them together. We have explored themes for periods of time and we were influenced by things that were happening in this country, or in the area where we lived, or in our lives.”
Award winning novelist Jonathan Lethem contributes the 3-part short story, “Traveler Home,” as the text for the book. It is a curious tale with ominous overtones about a city man living in the country who knows that the local folk are different than him in behavior and attitude. But he survives by being flexible enough to get along with them and accept things for the way they are.
Lethem uses the artwork of Martin & Muñoz as inspiration for some of his story’s setting and imagery, but not his point of view. Lethem resolves his story benignly whereas Martin & Muñoz’s own work most often implies disturbing outcomes. Though Lethem’s writing is at odds with Martin & Muñoz’s seeming intentions, his approach illustrates how one artist can reshape the subject matter of other artists and take it in another direction.
Martin & Muñoz create their settings using plumber’s epoxy, miniature train figures (which are about a quarter inch high), water and alcohol, and silicate for snowflakes. Muñoz photographs the work using a medium format Mamiya camera and edits the various negatives together on a computer to create and finish the composite image from which prints are made.
Martin & Muñoz describes how Travelers came together as a book, “We were approached by Aperture. Initially, they asked us if we’d be interested in doing a children’s book, and we said no even though children love the globes, because children are very attracted to dark stories. Aperture came back with a proposal to basically document the work we’ve been doing for the last five years [2002-2007], which is a series of travelers, almost 200. They had seen that the work had evolved and grown and became richer and they thought that there was enough material to do a book. The danger with books is that you can have this certain amount of redundancy and actually deaden the experience or the power of the work if it doesn’t change up and develop during the course of the book and we didn’t want that deadness to happen. Aperture’s approach was to not make it as a typical art book—with an art critic’s or an art historian’s comments—but continue with the spirit of the work into the text. That was a pretty original idea.”
Travelers book editor Joanna Lehan says, “We all realized the work lent itself beautifully to the narrative space of a book, and that the book could reach beyond their considerable fine-art fan base. For Travelers, I suggested an initial format, edit, and sequence to the artists, got Jonathan Lethem involved, and hired a designer, Patricia Fabricant, and worked with them all to get to something everyone liked.
I first sequenced the work by separating it into categories, and created a very loose narrative arc, just a subjective starting point. From there, we talked and shuffled things around and created a ‘story’ together that felt right. It’s not meant to be linear, of course, it’s more a kind of dream logic—and very much subject to interpretation. And we had to make some hard decisions about how to package the work.”
It was this open-minded creative give-and-take along with collaborative ideas that ultimately allowed Aperture and Martin & Muñoz to make the book become a reality. Travelers will be released in October 2008 with an initial print run of 4,000 copies and Aperture will be able to add it to their long list of fascinating books.
