Photography Centre browsing library – Aperture

In May 2023 the V&A completed the Photography Centre, the UK’s largest suite of galleries for a permanent photography collection. Hosting a world-leading programme of displays, events and opportunities for research, it showcases the V&A’s vast photography collection, dating from the 1800s to the present day.

Across seven galleries, encompassing photographs, cameras and books from the beginnings of photography to today’s most dynamic contemporary practices, the Photography Centre is a place to discover photography’s many histories and explore its extensive impact on our lives.

The Kusuma Gallery (Room 98) is a new space within the Photography Centre dedicated to celebrating the relationship between photography and the book. Against the backdrop of the extensive Royal Photography Society Library, which is visibly stored and available to researchers by request, a browsing library offers all visitors the chance to read and handle a small selection of books. Aperture Foundation was invited to curate the first browsing library display, a series of artist monographs highlighting its 70 year history and commitment to the medium. Lesley Martin, Creative Director of Aperture, explains more in this post.

Over the course of seven decades, Aperture has published more than 700 books, establishing itself as one of the longest-running publishing houses devoted exclusively to photography – both through its eponymous quarterly magazine, and its commitment to the book as a vitally important part of a photographer’s practice. This work is underpinned by a foundational belief in the unique relationship of photography to the printed page, in which sequences of photographs and texts are translated into ink on paper as an optimal means of expressing and preserving a photographer’s vision.

One of Aperture’s long-standing beliefs is in the critical role of the ‘First Book’. The opportunity to publish a body of work for the first time invites an artist to consolidate and launch their photographs into the world as a comprehensive statement – not just a smattering of images released free of context or directorial intent. A successful first book can cement the legacy of a photographer, becoming almost synonymous with who they are and what they care about as an image maker. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) by Nan Goldin, both of which have remained in print since their initial release, are two such books, among many.

An Aperture First Book is not the exclusive prerogative of the ‘emerging’ artist – it may come late in life, as evidenced with Kwame Braithewaite’s first book, Black is Beautiful (2019), published at age 76, or Lisette Model’s first book, published at age 71 – or even posthumously, as with Arbus’s Monograph, published one year after the death of the artist by suicide in 1971, and Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer (2023), released more than a decade after his untimely death in 2011. The publication of a first book supports the injection of the new and under-recognised voices necessary to the continued growth of photography as an ever-evolving medium. It is a bet placed on the ongoing relevance of an artist’s work into the future. Especially in the midst of today’s excavation of, and care for, work by artists who did not receive their due attention during their lifetime, it’s never too late.

Looking back at the selection of Aperture’s First Books, we can trace the ways in which photography’s concerns have evolved over the last 50 years. From the development of photographic approaches, we get a feel for the issues of the day – Lynne Cohen’s cool, New Topographic-inflected descriptions of interiors in Occupied Spaces (originally published in 1987 and re-issued in 2012) to the unflinching, humanistic depiction of violence against women in Living with the Enemy (1991) by Donna Ferrato; from Penelope Umbrico’s Photographs (2011), with its astute exploration of the circulation of images in the digital era, to LaToya Ruby Jackson’s The Notion of Family (2014) and Delegation by Wendy Red Star (2022), each of which expands our understanding of the strategies of personal storytelling in provocative ways.

This is a history that is both progressive and digressive, mapping groundbreaking ideas across an engagement with – and often a challenge to – existing precedents. An Aperture First Book brings contemporary artists into dialogue with those of the past, underscoring intergenerational linkages. Lisette Model, originally published in 1979 and reissued in 2007, resonates with that of the artist’s former student, Diane Arbus, as well as with that of Deanna Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018), self-consciously titled to echo the titling of Arbus’s monograph. 

Fundamentally, a First Book propels an artist’s work out into the world; it is a time capsule to be discovered and returned to for as long as the book remains on someone’s bookshelves at home, in the library, or passed from hand to hand. I’m delighted to have this opportunity to revisit our ongoing lineage of First Books in the context of the V&A’s Kusuma Gallery, a new space dedicated to the photography and the book, celebrating the medium as a vital platform for artists yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

Aperture, a not-for-profit organisation, connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other – in print, in person, and online.