Aperture is a quarterly photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 magazine and a book publisher based in New York

Chelsea, Manhattan

Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, 30th Street to the north, the western boundary of the Ladies' Mile Historic District – which lies between the Avenue of the Americas and...

, New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation

Aperture Foundation

The Aperture Foundation was founded in 1952 by Ansel Adams, Minor White, Barbara Morgan, Dorothea Lange, Nancy Newhall, Beaumont Newhall, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren. Their vision was to create a forum for fine art photography, a new concept at the time. The first issue of...

, a non-profit organization

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 devoted to fine art photography

Fine art photography

Fine art photography refers to photographs that are created in accordance with the creative vision of the photographer as artist. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides a visual account for news events, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to...

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Magazine

Inspired by the production quality of Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...

's then defunct Camera Work

Camera Work

Camera Work was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It is known for its many high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world and its editorial purpose to establish photography as a fine art...

, Aperture magazine was founded by Minor White

Minor White

Minor Martin White was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while...

, Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....

, Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration...

, Barbara Morgan

Barbara Morgan (photographer)

Barbara Morgan was an American photographer best known for her work in dance. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture.- Biography :...

, Nancy Newhall

Nancy Newhall

Nancy Wynne Newhall was an American photography critic. She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture.Newhall was born Nancy Wynne in Lynn, Massachusetts,...

 and Beaumont Newhall

Beaumont Newhall

Beaumont Newhall was an influential curator, art historian, writer, and photographer. His The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photo history textbook...

. White, himself a photographer, edited the magazine from its first issue in 1952 until 1975. He died in 1976.

The first iteration of the magazine closed in 1964. Hoffman, a close friend and former student of then editor White, later restored the magazine, becoming its publisher and adopting a quarterly format.

The magazine helped publish a catalog by photographer Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal." A friend said that Arbus said that she was "afraid.....

, a year after her death. MoMA

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 curator John Szarkowski

John Szarkowski

John Szarkowski was a photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.-Early life and career:...

 was organizing an Arbus retrospective in 1972, but the catalog had been rejected by all the major publishing houses in the United States and Europe. Aperture agreed to publish Arbus' catalog and it was released in time for the show as Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph.

Book publisher

Aperture's book publication program began in 1965, with Edward Weston

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of...

: The Flame of Recognition, which became one of Aperture's best-selling titles.

In 1984, Aperture also published The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839–1900, which featured restored, British Victorian Era

Victorian era

The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

 photography.

Aperture Foundation

As of 2009, Both Aperture magazine and its book publishing arm are run by the nonprofit arts institution the Aperture Foundation. In 2003, the Foundation instituted the first Aperture/Michael E. Hoffman Award, in memory of Michael E. Hoffman (died 2001), who was Aperture's publisher for 37 years.

The Aperture Foundation sponsors limited edition portfolios, lectures, conferences and touring gallery exhibitions. In 2005, it opened a gallery for fine art photography in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

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