For over thirty years, the New York Times Magazine has presented the myriad possibilities and applications of photography. Aperture is pleased to present the upcoming publication and exhibition The New York Times Magazine Photographs, which reflects upon and interrogates the very nature of both photography and print magazines at this pivotal moment in their history and evolution. Edited by Kathy Ryan, long-time photo editor of the magazine, and with a preface by former editorial director Gerald Marzorati, this volume presents some of the finest commissioned photographs worldwide in four sections: reportage, portraiture, style, and conceptual photography, including photo illustration. Diverse in content and sensibility, and consistent in virtuosity, the photographs are accompanied by reproduced tear sheets to allow for the examination of sequencing and the interplay between text and image, simultaneously presenting the work while illuminating its distillation to magazine form. This process is explored further through texts offering behind-the-scenes perspective and anecdotes by the many photographers, writers, editors, and other collaborators whose voices have been a part of the magazine over the years. David Campany contributes a critical essay that provides an in-depth history of the magazines relationship to photography, contextualizing its contributions within the larger world of magazine work. Also addressed are issues of documentary photography in relation to more conceptual photography; the efficacy of story-telling; and what makes an image evidentiary, objective, subjective, truthful, or a tool for advocacy; as well as thoughts on whether these matters are currently moot, or more critical than ever. As such, The New York Times Magazine Photographs aims to serve as a springboard for a rigorous, necessary, and revitalized examination of photography as presented within a modern journalistic context.

Highlights the role of photography and other forms of aesthetic practice in processes of state formation and bureaucratic transition

Scholarship on photography’s earliest years has tended to focus on daguerreotypes on metal or on the European development of paper photographs made from glass or paper negatives. But Americans also experimented with negative-positive processes to produce photographic images on a variety of paper formats in the early decades of the medium. Paper Promises: Early American Photography presents this rarely studied topic within photographic history. The well-researched and richly detailed texts in this book delve into the complexities of early paper photography in the United States from the 1840s to 1860s, bringing to light a little-known era of American photographic appropriation and adaptation. Exploring the economic, political, intellectual, and social factors that impacted its unique evolution, both the essays and the carefully selected images illustrate the importance of photographic reproduction in shaping and circulating perceptions of America and its people during a critical period of political tension and territorial expansion. Due to the fragility of paper photography from this period, the works in this catalogue are rarely displayed, making the volume an essential tool for any scholar in the field and a very rare peek into the mid-nineteenth century.

Collects more than four hundred rarely seen or previously unpublished photographs taken between 1935 and 1943 by the Farm Security Administration, depicting such subjects as dispossessed rural society, large cities, and small towns throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. 10,000 first printing.