Aperture’s new home reflects the non-profit’s commitment to ‘a democratic medium’

Aperture, the non-profit publisher dedicated to photography, reopened on 18 September in a new permanent home spanning the ground floor and lower level of a historical building at the corner of 78th Street and Columbus Avenue on New York’s Upper West Side. With a street-facing bookstore, gallery space for exhibitions and public programming, staff offices and commons area, the 10,000-sq.-ft headquarters gives greater visibility and stability to the organisation that has been supporting photographers and conversations about the medium for decades.

“It’s a really different relationship with our audience than before,” says executive director Sarah Meister, comparing the prominence of its street-level presence in a residential neighbourhood near the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Historical with Aperture’s prior location on the fourth floor of a side street in Chelsea’s gallery district.

“This is our opportunity to think not just about serious photographers but the photo curious, the moms with their strollers walking down the street who just meander in,” she adds.

Founded in 1952 by a group of photographers that included Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Minor White, Aperture began as a quarterly magazine based in Berkeley, California, where White was living. After he moved operations to Rochester, New York, Aperture expanded to producing photography books in 1965, starting with a volume dedicated to Edward Weston—one of more than 1,000 titles published by the non-profit and reissued last year in a 60th-anniversary edition. In 1985, the organisation relocated to New York City in a townhouse, donated by a trustee, on East 23rd Street. That was sold in 2005, when Aperture moved to a rental space in Chelsea, which it downsized in 2019 with the closure of its gallery and bookstore.

Sustainability

“Renting is just not a sustainable proposition for a non-profit,” says Meister, who took the helm at Aperture in 2021 after more than 25 years as a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She says she looked at properties from Harlem to Battery Park before the organisation purchased this retail space in an 1886 residential building (once home to the restaurant Ocean Grill and the vintage store Alice Underground, familiar to New Yorkers of a certain age). A $25m capital campaign, almost 70% achieved, has supported Aperture’s new home, which was designed by the architecture firm Levenbetts and built out by the construction manager Sciame.

“Nothing’s too fussy, nothing’s too perfect, but it feels like a good space for us, scaled to what we need,” Meister says, giving a preview of the public spaces, nested within staff offices, where the architects have retained the weathered brick walls and vestigial fireplaces of what was originally the building’s communal dining room and kitchen below. “There’s a little bit of urban archaeology when you walk around.”

Inaugural show

For the inaugural exhibition in the new space, Aperture Loves New York (until 1 November), Meister has selected 24 photographers long championed by the organisation—including Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems and Nan Goldin—who have engaged deeply with the city. One framed print by each leans on picture rails drilled into the brick walls of the gallery, with every photographer’s corresponding Aperture publication displayed on a central table for visitors to peruse.

“I don’t want to look like a museum—we’re a publisher,” Meister says. “I want you to walk in and ideally be drawn to the books, and then the installations will tie into our programme.” For public events, including conversations this autumn with three photographers in the exhibition—Gillian Laub, Stephen Shore and Coreen Simpson—the gallery’s table will be swapped with seating for several dozen attendees.

In the adjacent bookstore, with three arched windows facing Columbus Avenue, new publications by Tina Barney, Alex Webb and Elle Pérez will be available this autumn alongside Aperture’s extensive backlist of books still in print, the quarterly magazine, limited-edition prints often done in conjunction with book projects and artist collaborations including an umbrella by Vik Muniz and placemats by Stephen Shore. One table here is for rotating partnerships with other publishers, starting with Anshika Varma, the founder of Offset Projects in New Delhi. She is curating a selection of photography books representing the independent publishing scene in India and will give a public talk at Aperture this autumn.

Meister aims to keep the price points accessible. “For a democratic medium, the form of the book and the form of the magazine are really key,” she says. “We are interested in how photography infuses and infects all aspects of modern life.”