Seventy-Four Years to Get a Room

Aperture spent 74 years arguing photography deserved a real home. It just got one — the same year the argument stopped needing to be made.

Aperture magazine started in Minor White's living room in San Francisco, spring 1952 — the first journal since Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work folded in 1917 to argue, in print, that photography counted as real art. Nobody on the founding roster got paid: not White, not the photographers in the pages, not Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange or Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who put up the founding money and the founding argument instead.

That argument took 74 years to earn a building. Aperture just announced it opens its first-ever permanent home on September 18 — 10,000 square feet across two floors of an 1886 building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, directly across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. The opening show, "Aperture Loves New York," hangs Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, Carrie Mae Weems — most of the names Aperture spent seven decades insisting belonged in a museum in the first place.

Here's the part that gets me: the fight that needed a magazine in 1952 is basically over. Nobody argues anymore about whether a photograph counts as art — there are more photographs taken before breakfast today than Aperture printed in its first twenty years combined, and none of them waited on a gallery's permission. The institution built to win that argument just got its trophy the same year the argument stopped mattering.

Across the street, the natural history museum has been photographing specimens as evidence, not art, since before Aperture's founders were born — same medium, filed under a completely different heading, in a neighborhood that never had to argue for anything. It just started shooting.