Author(s): Aperture

Photography

This spring, Aperture magazine presents issue #250, "We Make Pictures in Order to Live," which explores the relationship between photography and storytelling across generations and geographies. Featuring visual stories that excite, surprise, and illuminate daily life, this issue's title is a nod to the late, celebrated writer Joan Didion, who declared, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Aperture contributors explore the quiet poetry-- or clamorous disorder--of the everyday, and attest that making photographs is a way of being aliveIn a sweeping introductory essay, Brian Dillon asks how we might view Didion through photography, and what images come to mind when we think of her writing. Thessaly La Force profiles Bieke Depoorter, who sees documentary photography both as a listening exercise and a form of investigation, blurring the lines between authorship, fiction, and truth. Alistair O'Neill takes stock of Nick Waplington's vibrant records of subcultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Lena Fritsch writes about the "exquisite world-making" of photographer Eikoh Hosoe's collaborative practice. Tiana Reid reconsiders Charles "Teenie" Harris's vivid, midcentury portraits of Black life in Pittsburgh, several of which are published for the first time in this issue. Among the portfolios, Casey Gerald discusses Adraint Bereal's images depicting the agony and ecstasy of being a Black college student in the US today. Yvonne Venegas searches for family ghosts in the Mexican landscape, which poet and novelist Daniel Saldaña París describes as "an exercise in freedom and intelligence." Kamayani Sharma looks at Gauri Gill's images of a community masquerade in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and its potential to reverse power dynamics inherent in seeing and being seen.