For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of magazine photography, through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the medium, from photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, long-time New York Times Magazine photo editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative, creative processes of the past fifteen years that have made this magazine the leading venue for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media. The exhibition is comprised of eleven individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that have been presented in the pages of the magazine. While by no means comprehensive, the projects featured in the exhibition mirror the magazine’s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage, portraiture, as well as fine art photography. Using visual materials drawn from different stages of the commissioning process—shot lists, work prints and contact sheets, videos, tear sheets and framed prints—the magazine’s collaborative methodology is revealed from initial idea to the published page, and, in some cases, its continuation beyond magazine publication, for example when a subject that began as an assignment has become a part of a photographer’s ongoing work. The exhibition includes an extensive series of blow-ups of selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty-years of the magazine. About Kathy Ryan, curator of the exhibition and editor-in-chief if the New York Times Magazine : under her leadership, the magazine has won numerous awards from The Pictures of the Year competition, World Press Photo, The Society of Publication Designers, and The Overseas Press Club. She was recognized as Canon Picture Editor of the Year in 1997 at the Visa Pour L’Image Festival in Perpignan and in 2003 was named Picture Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards.
About Aperture : located in New York’s Chelsea art district—is a world-renowned non-profit publisher and exhibition space dedicated to promoting photography in all its forms. Aperture was founded in 1952 by photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and writer/curator Nancy Newhall, among others. These visionaries created a new quarterly periodical, Aperture magazine, to foster both the development and the appreciation of the photographic medium and its practitioners. In the 1960s, Aperture expanded to include the publication of books (over five hundred to date) that comprise one of the most comprehensive and innovative libraries in the history of photography and art. Aperture’s programs now include artist lectures and panel discussions, limited-edition photographs, and traveling exhibitions that show at major museums and arts institutions in the United States and internationally.
