Aperture – Issue 262 Spring 2026 – Aperture

Yet the history of American photography was forged in the mines. Ian Bourland the indelible traces of mining are impossible to miss. From abandoned shafts and ghost towns to gleaming refineries and places newly resplendent with fancy houses and fancier pickup trucks, the perennial boom-and-bust shapes the landscape. In Butte or the Bakken Formation, northern Utah or the Navajo Nation, it is clear that American history is a procession of resources being wrested from lodes far beneath the surface, its modernity a great speculative venture.

Photography’s history, too, is a mineral one. As a spate of recent ecologically minded scholarship reminds us, the act of recording photonic energy is metallurgy in miniature: precious amalgams activated by other chemicals affixed to copper or tin. The rise of photography in the 1840s was made possible by new strikes of silver and gold.

And many of those early camera operators set their lenses on those doing the sluicing, digging, and refining. Timothy H. O’Sullivan was famous for his battle- field images and harsh framing of the West’s Rocky Mountains, but he was also among the first to document the rush towns of Nevada that cropped up after the Comstock Lode was found in the territory in 1859.

From the beginning, American practitioners worked to forge new genres of portraiture and landscape photog- raphy centered around these pockets of extraction. Today, extraction is a buzzword. Emerging from ecological humanities and theories of the Anthropocene over the past decade, it can now mean anything exploitative or inequitable, From the beginning, American photographers created genres centered around pockets of extraction.

Page 72: Grant Mudford, From Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach, 1979 This page: Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Savage Mine, Curtis Shaft, Virginia City, Nevada, 1868 No. 262 especially in economic relations. In mining history, the term simply describes the laborious—often brutal—process of moving matter from one place to another, converting it from its rawer forms into more refined yields. Extracting is something humans have done all over the world for millennia, and it was the key driver of many of the colonial endeavors that transformed the planet since the fifteenth century.

Visualizing such a sprawling terrain is an elusive task, but one to which photography’s relent- less archival bent is well suited. Accordingly, the exhibition Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, which opens a multicity tour this May at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, draws together some 150 works and makes explicit an undercurrent running through the medium’s nearly two-hundred-year trajectory.

Marshaling such a vast range of objects could have been a task without end, spanning the gamut of countless corporate, popular, and fine-art photographs.

Yxta Maya Murray on Sophie Rivera’s portraits of New Yorkers on the margins 24 TIMELINE Shana Lopes on photography and magic 26 NOTEBOOK Stephen Shore on a rediscovered work of juvenilia 28 CURRICULUM David Benjamin Sherry on Robert Adams, Kenneth Anger, and Lana Del Rey 152 ENDNOTE Dana Lixenberg on photographing Tupac, Biggie, and Kate Moss 30 EDITORS’ NOTE The End of Nature?

32 TREE OF LIFE Can Mitch Epstein save America’s oldest forests? Dan Beachy-Quick 40 OASES Trouble in paradise M’hammed Kilito 50 FLOOD ZONE César Rodríguez chronicles Mexico’s disappearing coastal towns Elisa Díaz Castelo 62 DRY SPELLS Hashem Shakeri tells stories of scarcity and perseverance in Iran Kaelen Wilson-Goldie 72 BENEATH THE SURFACE The underground histories of photography and extraction Ian Bourland 80 BACK TO THE LAND Michael Schmelling tracks a fading counterculture in Northern California Jeremy Miller The End of Nature?

Spring 2026 50 THE END OF NATURE? No. 262 7 Front cover: Hashem Shakeri, from the series The Kahur Does Not Fall Unless the Earth Wills It, Balochistan, Iran, 2018–ongoing Supported by Magnum Foundation (See page 62) Subscribe to Aperture and read more at aperture.org. Features The PhotoBook Review 146 90 THE PREGNANT TREE Gayatri Ganju conjures the secret history of a sacred forest Amitava Kumar 100 ALIGHT The everyday miracles of Rinko Kawauchi Pico Iyer 112 THE FAR SIDE OF THE EARTH What was Earthrise?

Eva Díaz 118 BUTTERFLY EFFECT Lucas Foglia traces the migration of people and butterflies Lydia Millet 126 TERRA INFIRMA The forensic sublime of Victoria Sambunaris Sean J Patrick Carney 138 TOKYO STORIES Takashi Homma speaks with Marigold Warnerabout his photobook philosophy. 142 TINY TALES Hannah Stamler surveys the untold history of children’s photobooks 144 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Silas Martí catches up with São Paulo’s {Lp} Press 146 MEET THE PRESS Sue Medlicott and Thomas Bollier discuss the world of photobook printing 148 Reviews of photobooks by Tessa Boffin, Pippa Garner, Mari Katayama, and more 90 80 SPRING 2026 8 APERTURE The Magazine of Photography and Ideas Aperture is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to creating insight, community, and understanding through photography.

Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society. Aperture (ISSN 0003-6420) is published quarterly, in spring, summer, fall, and winter, at 380 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10024. Subscriptions are $75/year.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 1221ac04aaf33fcc
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 75,277,911 bytes (71.791 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781597116015, 2129467113
• Pages: 157
• Language: English (en)

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