Aperture Foundation
Encyclopedia
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....
, 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...
, 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 :...
, 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...
, 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,...
, 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...
, 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 Aperture (magazine)
Aperture (magazine)
Aperture is a quarterly photography magazine and a book publisher based in New York, New York. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to fine art photography.-Magazine:...
was published in spring 1952 in San Francisco. Aperture's efforts increased respect for photography and its popularity among contemporary artists soared.
In January 2011, Englishman Chris Boot joined the organization as its director. Mr. Boot has been previously employed by both Magnum Photos
Magnum Photos
Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo...
and Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press is a British publisher of books on the visual arts, including art, architecture, photography, and design worldwide.As of 2009, Phaidon's headquarters are in London, UK, though they were in Oxford for many years, with offices in New York City, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Tokyo...
.
Aperture is a not-for-profit. The foundation is committed to shining a spotlight on work that is new and challenging while providing a forum for reevaluations of the history of the medium.
Intellectual rigor and calculated risk-taking have always defined Aperture Foundation, as expressed by the mission statement:
The purpose of Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to advance photography in all its forms and to foster the exchange of ideas among audiences worldwide.
Books
Aperture is known as publisher of photography books, with more than 500 titles in print. Some, like the Diane ArbusDiane 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.....
: Monograph, have been in print for 40 years. [ Several of Aperture's approximately 20 new titles a year are hailed as "best photography books" by industry leaders. Any given season, at least one, and frequently two or three new books are the first ever for the artist in question. Aperture also supports the efforts of other non-profit organizations by partnering on books, exhibitions, and educational programming.