For over 25 years, Sarah Meister built an exceptional curatorial career at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where her many critically acclaimed exhibitions and publications included Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (2021), Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020), and Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 (2020). She was the lead instructor for the online course Seeing Through Photographs and co-director of the August Sander Project.
In May 2021, Sarah Meister joined Aperture as Executive Director, where she oversees Aperture’s book publishing and flagship magazine, educational and outreach programs, and creative partnerships with artists and institutions. Helen Trompeteler recently spoke with Sarah about Aperture’s history, her vision for its future, and the central role of photography in our contemporary experience.
Thinking about personal beginnings in photography, I know you initially engaged with photography as a practitioner. And then you studied with Peter Bunnell, who sadly passed away recently. And I wondered if you would like to share a few details of this time?
My own beginnings in photography don’t really bear mention. But I will say by the time I met Peter Bunnell; I had made peace with the fact that, as I learned of real achievements in photography, I understood the gap between those and my own. So yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about Peter recently and our sort of twinned arcs through the photography world. Peter, starting at Aperture, and then going to MoMA and then going to Princeton - and myself, starting at Princeton, then going to MoMA and then going to Aperture. There’s wonderful serendipity in that.
He was a very important figure to so many people in the field. Just today, I was talking with someone who was thinking about what it would mean to trace not just the first generation of people who studied with him directly, but those who have studied with those who studied with him, which then really covers a tremendous section of the field. Especially in his curatorial work, he was really pushing boundaries that people are just now in recent decades catching up to understand. And so that person I was talking with was sort of bemoaning, ‘oh, it's too bad, he didn’t stay a curator’. But I think I’m a little bit glad he didn’t stay a curator, selfishly, and I’m taking the same feeling to heart - I loved being a curator, but it is exciting to do something different.
Maquette and final edition of Aperture issue 1, 1952, featuring an untitled photograph by Dorothea Lange. Courtesy The Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Bequest of Minor White.
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University
Before we talk about Aperture in more detail, I wanted to reflect a little on your last exhibition at MoMA. Fotoclubismo was such a revelation to me; it introduced me to many new artists that I hadn’t discovered before. And it made me think a lot about the exclusions that can happen in photography - whether around boundaries of distinction or geographical biases. Can you share a few reflections on this aspect of the exhibition, and also discuss how you propose to counter such biases when directing future programming at Aperture?
Well, I think that the first thing is acknowledging your own complicity in constructing these narratives of exclusion. And that’s not easy work, but that is what is required of each of us going forward. And I would say that was the perfect exhibition to be thinking about, as the country and the world were grappling with this idea of how the structures and systems in which we have operated, served to suppress, to diminish, to distract, from larger, more important stories.
Photography is an unruly mess, you know, we know this. And on some level, to make sense of it, we set up these hierarchies to say - okay, here, this is art, science, journalism, and this is amateur photography. And, inevitably, when you’re drawing these structures, you’re creating hierarchies. You’re simplifying for the sake of understanding. Where I am now, and where I hope Aperture will be, is in a sense a kind of leaning into the porosity of this. Photography isn’t neat, life isn’t neat, history isn’t neat. We just need to make peace with that as a way of moving forward.
And so yes, I believe that understanding and clarity can come through considerations of individual achievements. Yes, I loved that my last exhibition at MoMA was about amateur practices. And that was a very important thing for me to finish thinking through. And then, once I had thought it through, I thought I would rather contemplate where photography is in the world today, not within the context of a modern art museum, even though that was an unbelievable privilege and gift for my whole career. But what happens when you put photography at the center and see how that expands from there? It felt like once that exhibition was on view, I said to myself, okay, I think I’m done, I think I’m ready. 26 and a half years later, if I’m going to leave MoMA for anything, I’m happy it’s for Aperture.
Installation view of Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964, May 8, 2021 - September 26, 2021. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
Aperture closed its permanent gallery space in Chelsea just before the pandemic. And that must have necessitated new opportunities for collaboration with exhibition partners. Are you able to share anything about plans for Aperture’s future physical space? Or perhaps it’s too early to talk about that?
I mean, it’s early in that I don’t have one that I could tell you about. But I can tell you; Aperture won’t have an exhibition space in Manhattan in the way it did, although we intend to have space to convene with our audiences and share what we do. And that was a strategic decision that the organization made before I arrived. There are so many places in New York City where photographs are displayed. And at a time when resources are limited, how you function as a nonprofit is an expression of where you want to be in the work you want to do. I think that what Aperture does that no one else can do is be a kind of catalyst of understanding and connective tissue between universities and museums and artists and audiences in a way that doesn’t require an exhibition space in Manhattan.
Even right now, there are two exhibitions on view at ICP that emerged out of Aperture publications. So, this is emblematic I hope of the future for Aperture. I don’t think we need to operate a space in New York. I’m very grateful that the decision was made before I arrived, but it is a decision I support. At the same time, the ICP exhibitions are different in that those were organized by ICP. But Aperture itself organizes exhibitions in partnership – for example, Antwaun Sargent for The New Black Vanguard or Wendy Red Star for Native America, or Kwame Brathwaite. We have all these incredible exhibitions, that for decades have been traveling around the country and around the world. And I confess, I wasn’t sufficiently appreciative of that fact. I had really thought about exhibitions as something that you needed a major museum for to make value for the public. But what Aperture’s exhibitions have shown me - and these are exhibitions that go to the Blanton Museum, or the Detroit Institute of Art, for example - we have extraordinary partners around the country and around the world, who help our ideas reach audiences through these exhibitions.
So, I think on some level, this is an unwinding of my snobbery. There is an important role that museums and museum curators play in bringing together photographs as objects and as ideas. And I believe in the aura of photography. Yet, I also have been coming to realize that there’s a preciousness associated with that. And that is somehow at odds with the fundamentally democratic nature of the medium. And that you can both honor and respect photographs in that context and understand that giving broader audiences a chance to interact with similar ideas in ways that are much more cost-effective, and dare I say, on a popular level, that’s really valuable too. And when I say popular, I don’t mean less significant in terms of their intellectual ambition; I simply mean placed in the path of more people.
One of the last things I did at MoMA was work on a Walker Evans exhibition that’s being circulated through Art Bridges. And the idea was, why should you have to live in a major urban area to access to these objects and ideas? And that is a persuasive question. And so, I love the ways in which Aperture’s exhibitions will really flourish in the world, even without a space in New York City from which they launch.
Dana Scruggs, Fire on the Beach, 2019, from The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019)
Thinking about Aperture’s beginnings, it perhaps initially reached a limited group of photographers, editors, and educators. Over many decades since, its audience has grown into a global community of readers interested in images, culture, and society. How do you personally critically reflect on who the audiences of Aperture are and should be? And what are your hopes for how Aperture can best serve the photography community today?
Well, one of the things I loved before I even applied for the job, I was working on Fotoclubismo and thinking about this post war moment. And reading Peter Bunnell’s edited book about the Minor White years at Aperture, which is an extraordinary resource. I looked at it for the Dorothea Lange Words and Pictures exhibition, and I returned to it often. So, by the time they called me to interview, all of this was at the very front of my mind because Aperture was singularly important in framing things that we have come to accept. Well, it was singularly important in a way that has maybe become oversimplified in time, but what I loved is that as I was looking back, that diverse audience was present from the very beginning. So, in the second editorial of Aperture magazine, Melton Ferris, one of the lesser-known founders of the magazine, wrote: ‘Aperture draws no editorial boundaries between the professional and the amateur, the pictorialist and the documentarian, the journalist and the scholar’. And I thought to myself, wow, what a remarkable declaration of ambition for a magazine. And wouldn’t it be great if, instead of trying to create hierarchies and structure, we went back to that and really embraced the idea of an audience for photography that encompasses everyone who holds a camera in their back pocket? And so, I think Aperture’s history points to this direction in some ways, and that aligns philosophically and ethically with where I think the medium is and can be.
One of the many things I admired during your tenure at MoMA was your Seeing Through Photographs course, which was a landmark in bringing educational access to photography collections in such an accessible way. I think you reached some 375,000 learners. How has that experience informed your ideas for how Aperture’s digital programs could evolve in the future?
Well, that course and that experience engaging with those learners, I’m forever grateful to Seeing Through Photographs. What I brought to that was how much I love thinking about photographs in the world today. And what all those learners brought was a consciousness in my mind of how much broader that interest is. And, on some level, the example of that course, I think, led me to Aperture because Aperture wants to and can be a point of connection for anyone interested in photography.
And so, in terms of digital programming, we continue to think about how Aperture’s website can reach broader audiences. One of the new initiatives that we’re going to be doing, that on some level was inspired by Seeing Through Photographs, is we’re going to start an Aperture photo book club. On some level, it emerged during COVID with all our online programming around photographs, but it is anchoring it within an appreciation of photography through photo books. And the principle is that if we gather a small number of people in let’s say, my living room, we’ll talk about images and ideas and words and pictures and design and circulation, and all the things that fascinate me about photography. And if we do this, with artists and designers and editors and writers - we are opening up possibilities for understanding for that very audience. And then, of course, they carry it through not only in their enjoyment of that particular book that they might be holding on their lap at home, as we’re discussing it – it’s physical accessibility, not just an intellectual one.
Teju Cole has a beautiful piece in The Guardian from 2020, where he says that to enjoy photographs online is like a facsimile of the original. It’s like instant coffee or artificial flowers, or frozen pizza. And yet, a photo book is an actual physical enjoyment in the privacy of your own home. Meaning that museums are one way of doing it, but a photo book is another, once you help people understand its functions – for example, what do the head and tail bands mean? What do the end papers do? How do you understand how the titles live with respect to the images? This is an educational opportunity really that people can carry forward to other books and other places.
And so, I’ll also say that Seeing Through Photographs showed me how difficult it is to develop an online course. So, I’m not sure that that is going to be the best model for Aperture. But I think that the ethos of it and the principle of making ideas accessible through digital technologies to audiences around the world is something that we really want to attend to.
And so, my next question, Aperture’s magazine has a very distinctive identity, with each issue focused on a thought-provoking theme. And I wondered if you wanted to sustain that overall approach or whether you and colleagues are beginning to collaboratively explore new approaches to the content, form, and structure of the magazine?
Well, I have to say, I have such tremendous respect for Michael Famighetti, Brendan Embser, and Nicole Acheampong - and the magazine team is amazing. You know, the magazine is just tremendously important, and it has been since 1952. It is the heart of what Aperture does, and whether that’s for example, the Vision and Justice issue, that then blossoms into a series of books that we hope we’re doing with Sarah Lewis and Deb Willis, and Leigh Raiford - or the exhibition program and issue of the magazine. But there is, I think, a sense of if you are not specifically interested in the theme of a particular issue of the magazine, how can we make sure that there’s enough to sustain the interest of somebody who’s interested in photography writ large? And so, the one thing I asked Michael, Brendan, and Nicole to think through with me was, how can we build up the front and the back of the magazine? Not to disrupt the incredible things that they’re doing, but to say, how do we make sure that every issue of the magazine attends to this broad audience that I have in mind?
Obviously, the compelling photographs and the portfolios in an issue that respond to the theme, the amazing writers that they get, all of this can and should be undisturbed. But there are people for whom that isn’t a sufficient reason to subscribe to the magazine. We're even incorporating photo book reviews, which had been a twice annual ride along with the magazine, into the magazine itself to think what can we do to make every issue of the magazine speak to anyone with a serious interest in the medium. You’ll notice in the magazine’s upcoming issue, this will begin to take root, and it will blossom on from there. And I think what’s been wonderful is that I wouldn’t presume to tell Michael Famighetti what to do, but he has been marvelously responsive to this, and he wants to grow the subscriptions as well, and he wants this magazine to be in the hands of more people. And so, we’ve had a really good time thinking about how to protect all the great things they have done. For me, even as a curator, the magazine was an unbelievable resource. When I was working on Gordon Parks and the Atmosphere of Crime, I took Nicole Fleetwood’s Prison Nation issue like my textbook. We don’t want to do anything to disrupt that. But I do want to think about anyone who isn’t a subscriber, why not? It speaks to a sophisticated audience, and it should, but there are ways of helping encourage accessibility that we’re thinking about.
Aperture announced the 2021 photo book awards shortlist this morning, and I’ve been catching up with this news. And I wondered if you could give a few examples of favorite recent publications, which for you personally, have extended your expectations around what a photo book could be, in terms of form or approach?
First of all, I think all of the honorable mentions on that list are doing that because those are really expanding the form. I’ll also say, first of all, I was very careful not to interfere with the jury. I wouldn’t even let myself go up to the room where this was all happening because I didn’t want to influence anything. But for instance, Farah Al Qasimi’s book that Capricious published was one that I had ordered personally. Because I’m really interested in Farah's work and that idea of how an attentiveness to the commercial languages of photography can be understood in a very serious artistic context. But, one of the things I love about the submissions to that prize, in general, is what that tells about the vitality of the medium and about the ways in which photographers are probing how their photographs ought to exist on pages.
And when I was a juror, not this year, but the year before, I was so inspired by all that was happening in that field. It’s one expression of recognition of how photographs circulate in the world, for example, from Walker Evans American Photographs through to The Americans, and forwards - the ways in which photographs live on the printed page in books and magazines, and online, these are all an inseparable part of the medium.
Farah Al Qasimi, Lady Lady, 2020. Courtesy Helena Anrather and The Third Line, Dubai. From Aperture Magazine 241 “Utopia”
Aperture is also currently preparing its 2021 gala, which celebrates the range of your publishing program. And I wondered if you could talk a little about the decision process behind this year’s selection of artists and maybe expand on the work of some of its recipients like Sara Cwynar, for example.
So historically, Aperture has had themes for its galas. After I accepted the role and before I started, we were talking, and they asked, what’s our theme? And I said, what if our theme is no theme? What if our theme is this very plurality that the editors of Aperture were articulating from the start? Our theme is truly no theme, which is to say, Aperture wants to engage with what’s happening in the world today, and we do this through our publishing program, and we want to do this through our gala. So, the three honorees really occupy different positions in the field, and in the end, that’s why they are together.
Graciela Iturbide is an amazing photographer whose work I had acquired while I was a curator at MoMA. It was on view in our inaugural reinstallation in a gallery that my colleague Lucy Gallun had organized. And Aperture is doing a workshop series book with Graciela that’s coming out in early 2022. So, Aperture had visited her when the Mexico City issue of the magazine came out, and it just felt like she represented a means of engaging with photography and its history that was important to uphold and to celebrate.
Sara Cwynar has a very different approach to photography and image-making and the commodification and circulation of photographs in the world today. She is also somebody I had worked with at MoMA. We had commissioned her to do a project and worked on an acquisition of a series of photographs. And so, when I signed on for Aperture, and I learned that they were publishing this first major monograph of her work, I thought this was so fantastic. And the book itself is so smart in that it interweaves her practices between video and still photography and helps make these connections accessible. It’s not only a beautiful book, but it gives a sense of her approach to her practice that I think is really important.
So, these were two women whose work I admired, and then what Dr. Kenneth Montague has done with The Wedge Collection as a collector aligns so beautifully with so many of Aperture’s artists and voices that Aperture wants to bring forward. And so, doing books of collections, that’s a different way of saying, this too is important to Aperture and important in the world. We’re launching Kenneth’s book As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic at the end of this month.
So, there is no connection between Sara and Graciela and Kenneth, other than they connect with and think deeply about photographs in a way that models where I see the future of the medium.
Cover from Glass Life (Aperture,2021). © Sara Cwynar
Your previous exhibitions on Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks reflect your interest in and value of the social purpose of photography. And thinking about our current social and political time, how do you perceive photography's role in the context of justice and equity? Aperture’s Vision and Justice issue, which you mentioned earlier, had a huge impact. But how do you think Aperture can embed and continually expand those social values?
Well, yes, I mentioned that issue of the magazine really was a catalyst for all kinds of thinking, in a very meaningful way. And Sarah Lewis deserves extraordinary credit for helping people think through how photography and vision and justice are interrelated. I’m so thrilled that we will partner with Sarah going forward, as I mentioned in passing briefly before. But with this work, you don’t begin it and end it; this is ongoing. And when you grasp how photographs have that possibility throughout history - this was true for Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, and this is certainly true today - when you engage with that possibility, you understand that this is just essential work that can’t ever take a backseat; it has to always remain front of mind.
And I was very fortunate that at MoMA, I was able to pursue projects and acquisitions that allowed these ways of thinking to be front of my mind on a daily basis. And whether it was thinking about Francis Benjamin Johnston’s photographs – I mean, Lange and Parks for sure - but Francis Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton album where Latoya Ruby Frazier contributed a text. Or thinking through what representations of educational models mean, then and now. Or an acquisition that I did of Robert McNeill’s work and thinking through how somebody who may have been marginalized, frankly, as a black amateur photographer, who then became a professional, a commercial photographer, and thinking how does that work live in a book like Photography at MoMA? How does that work live in a gallery that we organized called Picturing America? How does that work live in another gallery about modern media? And so, one of the reasons I’m so thrilled to be at Aperture is that I’m surrounded by people who share a commitment to keep this front of mind every single day.
And some days, you can’t point to what the tangible value of it is. But you simply know that without committing to it, you’re in fact committing to the opposite. And so, I certainly am very conscious of the privileges that have brought me to where I am, and the only way to honor that is to make sure that you both look for opportunities to complicate, expand, and encourage these things.
Aperture, for instance, has an incredibly distinguished Work Scholar Program, and a lot of current staff members had been work scholars, but we used to pay them just a small stipend. And I said we’re going to pay those people. It’s a commitment to understanding how it’s not just the work that you publish; it’s about thinking through what Aperture as an organization means in the field? And what can we do to mentor young editors, young designers, and others in the field? And this is a commitment. Having experienced that at MoMA, it is something I continue to enjoy at Aperture, with no less commitment.
Covers of the award-winning 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine
You’ve pre-empted my next question, because you’ve touched on the Work Scholars Program. I think Aperture has an important role in diversifying the field of photography criticism and removing some of those barriers for young critics, editors, or people that want to access arts publishing. So that’s great if you’re re-evaluating the Work Scholars Program in more detail.
It has taken us a little while to do. I would say big picture; what I envision Aperture to be is a nonprofit. And that as a nonprofit, it uses its publishing and web platforms as a means of getting ideas and understanding out there in the world. Also, it means is taking responsibility for where the field is and what you can do to encourage this diversity. And that is not just in your program; it’s actually in the structure of your organization. And obviously, I’m conscious of what I don’t bring to that as a human being. And so, I have to do it through my actions. And I’m grateful that it’s not only the staff, but also the board too, who feel this, and that grasp how urgent this is.
Thank you, Sarah. So, my last question, I know it’s still relatively early in your tenure. But what are your thoughts on how you wish to expand Aperture’s legacy? We've touched on this a little already. Still, I wondered if you could say what you want to bring from your many years of curating in museums to your ambition for Aperture, both as a cultural presence in New York specifically and as a cultural presence for photography internationally?
Well, I think this ties a little to my last answer - I believe that Aperture holds a singular position in the field. And that by leaning into what is singular about it and thinking through - How can we connect artists and audiences? How can we support universities and museums? How can we encourage dialogue around why photographs matter today? Then, we’re really living up to our potential.
And it is an idea that’s bigger than art – and it approaches life. And I think that when Aperture is functioning as a real nonprofit, we are thinking through not only how do photographs matter, and why do they matter, but what can Aperture do to encourage that in the world. And when we can do that without undue concern for financial viability, but just in terms of dialogue and partnerships, this is the way. I think we can all do it together - we can be generous, be supportive, be encouraging, be critical, and in a sense that is made possible by those other instincts. And in doing that, we’re going to make a difference.
Connect with Aperture online and on its social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). You can also follow Sarah Meister’s work with photography on Instagram @thesarahmeister