Aperture (magazine)
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Aperture (magazine)

Aperture magazine, based in New York City, is an international quarterly journal specializing in photography. Founded in 1952, Aperture magazine is the flagship publication of Aperture Foundation.

The headquarters of Aperture magazine and the Aperture Foundation and Gallery are at 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor, New York, NY 10001.

Aperture is published four times a year, in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. It features photographs by established and emerging photographers, as well as artists experimenting with photo-related media. Each issue is usually themed and includes writings by critics, scholars, photography practitioners, and others involved in the field of photography.

The magazine was founded in 1952 by a consortium of photographers and proponents of photography: Ansel Adams, Melton Ferris, Dorothea Lange, Ernest Louie, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Dody Warren, and Minor White. It was the first journal since Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work to explore photography as a fine art. The journal's mission, as stated in its inaugural issue:

Aperture has been originated to communicate with serious photographers and creative people everywhere, whether professional, amateur or student... Aperture is intended to be a mature journal in which photographers can talk straight to each other, discuss the problems that face photography as profession and art, share their experiences, comment on what goes on, descry the new potentials. We, who have founded this journal, invite others to use Aperture as a common ground for the advancement of photography.

Minor White was appointed by the founders to be the editor of the magazine, which was at first published out of San Francisco. The magazine's dimensions were initially modest (9+38 by 6+14 in or 240 by 160 mm), and in its first two decades the photographs discussed and published in its pages were exclusively black and white (the preferred mode of most art photographers of the era). Many early issues were loosely organized around thematic concepts (such as "The Creative Approach" [vol. 2, no. 2, 1953], "The Controversial 'Family of Man'" [vol. 3, no. 2, 1955], and "Substance and Spirit of Architectural Photography" [vol. 6, no. 4, 1958]), or were monographic publications (the first of these was vol. 6, no. 1, 1958, on Edward Weston).

In 1953, the editorial offices moved to Rochester, New York. (White joined the staff of the George Eastman House, and in 1955 began teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology.) White was assisted with the magazine's editorial and production tasks by Peter C. Bunnell. From the outset, the magazine was appreciated by its readers as "a much needed forum for serious photographers." In 1962, vol. 10, no. 4, a monograph on photographer Frederick Sommer, was the first of many issues to be published also as a trade book.

Aperture, Inc., became a nonprofit foundation in 1963. In 1964, Michael E. Hoffman, a former student of White, became the foundation's publisher and executive director; he would shape the magazine and all other aspects of the foundation until his death in 2001. In 1965, Aperture launched a full-fledged book-publishing program (with Edward Weston: Photographer, The Flame of Recognition, edited by Nancy Newhall) that evolved in tandem with the magazine over the following decades. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the magazine's production was overseen by Stevan A. Baron (who supervised the production of nearly all of Aperture's publications until his retirement in 2003).

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