Aperture Magazine Anthology

Book excerpt: Published on the occasion of Aperture magazine's sixtieth anniversary, this is the first anthology of Aperture magazine ever published. This long-awaited volume will provide a selection of the best critical writing from the first twenty-five years of the magazine--the period spanning the tenure of cofounder and editor Minor White. Aperture was established in 1952 by a group of photographers, including Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and historian-curators Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. Their intention was to provide a forum "in which photographers can talk straight to each other, discuss the problems that face photography as profession an art, share their experiences, comment on what goes on, descry the new potentials." With its far-ranging interests in spirituality in diverse forms, and an adventurous commitment to a broad international range, Aperture has had a profound impact on the course of fine-art photography. The texts and visuals in this anthology will be selected by Peter C. Bunnell, White's protégé and an early member of the Aperture staff, who went on to become a major force in photography as an influential writer, curator, and professor. Essay contributors include Andreas Feininger, Henry Holmes Smith, Nathan Lyons, Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, Nancy Newhall, John Szarkowski, and other characters essential to the foundation of photography as an art form. Several issues will be reproduced in facsimile, and the book will be enlivened by other distinctive elements, including a selection of exceptional covers, and a selection of the colophons (short statements or quotes) that appeared at the front of each issue.