Made possible in partnership with the Rencontres d'Arles and Kering.
First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a groundbreaking classic by one of photography's most renowned artists.
At Twelve is Sally Mann's illuminating, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, taken in the artist's native Rockbridge County, Virginia. The age of twelve brings tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction maintained from the 1988 original publication, 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. The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. Within this book of portraits, many of which are accompanied by writings of the artist, the young women in Mann's unflinching large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer's gaze with a disturbing equanimity.
This reissue of At Twelve has been printed using new scans and separations from Mann's prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a quality true to the original edition.
In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of 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. 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.
Family Ties collects sixty large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney's career--accompanying the first retrospective exhibition of the artist in Europe at the Jeu de Paume, Paris. The book includes an essay by Quentin Bajac, the exhibition's commissioner and director, as well as an interview with the artist by Sarah Meister, the executive director of Aperture, and a text by the artist James Welling. These texts illuminate the artist's approach to large-format photography, her ongoing interest in the rituals of families, and her personal ideas of composition, color, and the complex relationship between photography and painting.
Tina Barney: Family Ties is copublished by Aperture and Atelier EXB.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya's photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. This volume unpacks his Dark Room series (2016-21), offering a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. The excavation and mapping of intellectual and artistic data points across the artist's work is presented through three distinct voices, allowing for a comprehensive cross-referencing of conceptual categories. Each category is alphabetized and illuminated via new texts by curator and scholar Gökcan Demirkazik; selections from previously published texts about the work by critics, colleagues, and friends; quotations of other writers' work that inspire the artist; as well as writings by the artist on his thematic preoccupations as they appear and reappear throughout this ongoing body of work. Dark Room A-Z serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuya's image-making, after nearly two decades of practice.
By depicting people from all over the world against a background that matches their skin tone, Ang lica Dass shows us how wonderfully colorful humans really are, questioning the concept of race and the limited categories we use to describe each other. These ideas are simply too small for a world that contains so many beautiful colors and people. The book asks us to consider how we see ourselves and others, through both similarities and differences. Kids also discover how to mix their own skin color with paint. Through a playful and dynamic layout, The Colors We Share encourages looking, questioning, and thinking bigger--inviting us to think about race, and our common humanity, in a new way.