Tina Barney: Family Ties (2024)

In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class to which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to her large-format photographs.

In 2024, Aperture published Family Ties, which collects sixty large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney’s career. These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie—a landscape of hidden tension found in microexpressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.

Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours (2023)

In her searing, diaristic account of a city and society in revolution, Myriam Boulos creates an intimate portrait of youth, queerness, and protest. What’s Ours, her debut monograph, brings together more than a decade of images, casting a determined eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019 with protests against government corruption and austerity through to the aftermath of the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020.

Photographing her friends and family with energy and intimacy, Boulos portrays the body in public space as a powerful symbol of vulnerability and resistance against neglect and violence. “Boulos’s lens inspires and entices her subjects,” writes Mona Eltahawy in an accompanying essay. “They know they have an ally, a secret sharer in their intimacy who then shares them with the rest of us.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours.

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (2024)

Born in 1994 in New York, Arielle Bobb-Willis first started to experiment with photography at the age of fourteen, when she was gifted an old Nikon N80 film camera by her high school history teacher after her family relocated to South Carolina. Since then, Bobb-Willis has become a rising photographer, having shot commissions for a range of magazines and fashion brands including Vogue, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Nike, Hermès, and more. In 2024, Aperture published the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Previously, Aperture had featured Bobb-Willis’s work in The New Black Vanguard (2017), which highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

In Keep the Kid Alive, Bobb-Willis invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaux, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. As Bobb-Willis notes in an interview from the book, “Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.”

Collect a limited-edition print by Arielle-Bobb Willis from Keep the Kid Alive.

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson worked with Weston as his partner and model, collaborating on some of his most iconic images. 

Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locations in the western United States where the earlier couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. In chasing Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, finding a new kinship with the collaborative duo as she navigates a cultural landscape that has changed, yet remains mired in the same mythologies about nature, the artist, desire, and inspiration. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.

Collect a limited-edition print from Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis.

An-My Lê: Small Wars (2025)

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and evacuated with her family from Vietnam to the United States in 1975. With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work.

First published by Aperture in 2005 and now reissued on its twentieth anniversary, Small Wars brings together three of Lê’s interconnected series—Viêt Nam, where Lê reconciles the memories of her childhood with the contemporary landscape; Small Wars, which explores a community of Vietnam War reenactors; and 29 Palms, which documents marines training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan—alongside a new afterward by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate two decades later.

Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. “What are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture? How does it become enmeshed with romance and myth over time?” Lê asks in an interview from the book with Hilton Als. “My concern is to make photographs that are provocative in response to the reality of war while challenging its context.”

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (2024)

I’m So Happy You Are Here is a critical and celebratory counternarrative to what we know of Japanese photography today. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences of women in Japanese society.

The volume showcases the work of twenty-five artists whose voices and practices have shaped the medium’s landscape across seven decades. Alongside the more than five-hundred images in the book is an illustrated bibliography and a selection of insightful essays and interviews from leading curators and historians—many of which have been translated in English for the first time. While I’m So Happy You Are Here does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, the book offers a deep dive into the significant contributions of women to the history of Japanese photography.

Collect a range of prints from artists featured in I’m So Happy You Are Here.

Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions (2024)

Pao Houa Her’s first monograph presents a deeply personal exploration of the fundamental concepts of home and belonging. A recipient of the 2023–24 Next Step Award, Her creates compelling and personal narratives grounded in the traditions and contemporary metaphors of the Hmong diasporic community. Throughout her images, the artist draws from myriad sources: apocryphal family lore, portraits of herself and her community, and reimagined landscapes in Minnesota and Northern California that stand in for Laos.

My grandfather turned into a tiger brings together four of the artist’s major series, reflecting her keen perspective on the boundary between authenticity and imitation. As Her has stated, photography is “a truth if you want it to be a truth.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Pao Houa Her: My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions.

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her idyllic images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Made between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.

Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce. They hunt and explore, braid one another’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes. Kurland imagines a world at once lawless and utopian—an Eden in the wild. “I wanted to make the communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls,” writes Kurland. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.”

Collect a special signed-book-and-print bundle of Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures.

Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women (2025)

First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve is an intimate yet unflinching portrayal of the interior complexities of the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Photographing in her native Rockbridge County, Virginia, Mann creates a collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, from the trying times of that age to its excitement and social possibilities.

This long sought-after reissue by one of photography’s most renowned artists retains the spirit of the original, highlighting both Mann’s large-format photographs alongside a series of her writings. As Ann Beattie wrote in 1988 for the book’s introduction: “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” Mann’s portraits do not shy away from the real consequences of this misunderstanding, documenting experiences of destitution, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy, and the girls in her photographs return the viewer’s gaze with equanimity.

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua (2025)

Susan Meiselas first traveled to Nicaragua in June 1978. Three years prior, she had joined Magnum Photos, and this trip marked her first experience working in conflict photography. She went on to spend just over a year in Nicaragua, documenting an extraordinary narrative of a nation in turmoil, from the powerful evocation of the Somoza regime during its decline in the late 1970s, to the evolution of the popular resistance that led to the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Originally published in 1981, and now in a third edition, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 is a contemporary classic and formative contribution to the literature of concerned photography. In the decades following the original publication, Meiselas has continued to contextualize and extend her photographs, using QR codes in this new edition to link to excerpts from films by the artist. “I’m asking the reader to consider not only the specific timeframe of this book,” says Meiselas in an interview from the volume with Kristen Lubben, “but to think about the broader perspective of history unfolding, and how in the passage of time a photograph of a single moment in a person’s life shifts its meanings as well as our perception of it.”

Diana Markosian: Father (2024)

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate, diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection. Weaving together documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera, Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger: her long-lost father.

The volume is a follow-up to her first book, Santa Barbara (2020), in which the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. In Father, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. Photographing over the course of a decade in her father’s home in Armenia, Markosian renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?” 

Collect a limited-edition, signed print-and-book set of Diana Markosian: Father.

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (2023)

Kristine Potter’s dark and brooding photographs reflect on the Southern Gothic landscape of the American South as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the American murder ballad (which has developed a cult appeal and continues to be rerecorded today), the riverscape frequently doubles as a crime scene. Places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond are haunted by both the victor and the violence in the world Potter conjures.

The artist’s seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs—capturing the landscape and creating evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of these stories. The resulting volume, Dark Waters, reflects the casual popular glamorization of violence against women that remains prevalent in today’s cultural landscape. As Potter notes, “I see a through line of violent exhibitionism from those early murder ballads, to the Wild West shows, to the contemporary landscape of cinema and television. Culturally, we seem to require it.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Kristine Potter: Dark Waters.

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century Black American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem, to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Collect the limited-edition print Dakar Roadside with Figures (1972) from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph.

Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022)

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star, who was recently awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations.

In 2022, Aperture published Red Star’s first major monograph, Delegation, a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, which gleans from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. “I’m also marking on history,” says Red Star in an interview from the volume. “And red—I always think about school and failing papers and getting that red mark on your paper. I wanted that red mark on history.”

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (2025)

Carrie Mae Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. Releasing this April alongside a related exhibition with Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, The Heart of the Matter is a comprehensive monograph that gathers together Weems’s landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82) to her most recent series on the Black church.

Throughout the book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the influential artist’s mind and eye. Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, the volume puts Weems—as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys—at the center of the discourse, underscoring the singular value of her vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

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