That Obscure Object of Desire: Aperture 253: Vol 253

Aperture Magazine Releases Winter Issue, “Desire,” Featuring an Expansive Interview with Renowned Fashion Photographer Juergen Teller

(New York—December 12, 2023) This winter, Aperture magazine presents “Desire,” an edition that considers desire as both an impulse and a state of mind. The issue features an expansive interview with Juergen Teller, whose photographs upend fashion’s vocabulary of glamour and aspiration, on the occasion of his major exhibition Juergen Teller: i need to live, opening at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris on December 16, 2023.

Photographers are natural voyeurs. The compulsion to want—or, in today’s parlance, to manifest—emerges throughout the work in this issue. Artists such as Nakeya Brown, Nabil Harb, Oto Gillen, Marcelo Gomes, and Jonathas de Andrade consider the body, the natural world, beguiling objects, and direct physical expressions of desire as the material for indelible images.

Andrew Maerkle profiles the celebrated Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, who for decades has conjured history through evocative personal objects, creating magnetic images that are at once surreal and surprisingly physical. Amanda Maddox considers a generation of women photographers whose work probes the feminist dynamics of seeing—and being seen. Moeko Fujii revisits Hisae Imai, an ascendent figure in Tokyo’s art and fashion scenes of the 1960s, and Lucy McKeon finds new resonance in the sensual self-portraits Melissa Shook made as a young woman and mother. In “Desire,” photographers render reality as unearthly—and take the viewer somewhere else altogether.

For more information and to preview select content from the issue, visit aperture.org/magazine.