Join Aperture and Martin Parr for the opening reception forLife’s a Beach, featuring the best selections from Parr’s beach photography, presented in conjunction with the May release of the beach-bag-size edition of Life’s a Beach. Parr has been photographing beaches for thirty years, documenting all aspects of them, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway. This selection brings to the fore Parr’s engagement with a cherished subject matter—that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together.

Join Aperture’s PhotoBook Review and Self Publish, Be Happy for COMPILATION TOKYO: REMIX, a launch party for the Self Publish, Be Happy mash-up and the PhotoBook Review 004, edited by Charlotte Cotton.

Artist Charlie Engman will work in situ to create a new artist zine by remixing COMPILATION TOKYO, a recent Self Publish, Be Happy / Goliga Books publication of work by young Japanese photographers, Go Itami, Koji  Kitagawa, Taisuke Koyama, Shinryo Saeki, Masafumi Shirakami, Hiroshi Takagi, Hiroshi Takizawa, Nerhol, Kenji Hirasawa, Daisuke Yokota, and Anne Schwalbe. This screen-printed, zine-like publication was originally created during a live event in Tokyo on April 7, 2013.

Engman will cut apart, re-photograph, and digitally modify photographs in order to create an entirely new body of work. These new works will be printed and photocopied on site to create a signed and limited-edition artist publication. The signed and limited edition publication will be available for sale after 8:30 pm at the Aperture Gallery and Bookstore.

Charlie Engman’s remix performance will begin promptly at 6:30 and will last approximately 2 hours; printing and book-making will continue throughout the evening.

Image © Charlie Engman

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Charlie Engman is an American artist and photographer. Engman received a BA First Class in Japanese and Korean studies from the University of Oxford in 2009, where he also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. There he began working as a commercial photographer and exhibiting his artwork, most notably in the 2009 exhibition Boule to Braid, curated by Richard Wentworth for Lisson Gallery. Upon graduating, Engman returned to his home country, where he began integrating his commercial, fashion, and art practices. His publications include FIELD(Hard Workers Club Press, 2011) and Flounder (Pau Wau Publications, 2013). Engman lives in New York

Self Publish, Be Happy was founded in 2010 with the aim of celebrating, studying, and distributing self-published photobooks. Its London-based collection contains more than one thousand publications; with an extensive series of workshops, talks, and projects, the organization has become a platform for a worldwide community of contemporary photographers.

Working in Tokyo under the imprint GOLIGA, Ivan Vartanian produces, edits, and publishes limited editions, experimental book works, and photography-based events. The principal objective of GOLIGA is to experiment with innovative ways of disseminating and engaging with photography.

This event is free for students with I.D., and Aperture supporters at the $250 level and above.

Join Bill Armstrong and W. M. Hunt for a conversation on color photography. Taking inspiration from the book I Send You This Cadmium Red, which features correspondence between critic John Berger and artist John Christie, Hunt and Armstrong have initiated a dialogue about color in photography. Starting with Armstrong’s technical overview of color photography and its history, as well as Hunt’s observations about color and its empathic power, the exchange is a means for the longtime friends to challenge each other through their ideas.

For their conversation at Aperture, they will offer thoughts about how color behaves; read from some of their written exchanges with each other; and take the audience on an unexpected and fresh journey through interpreting color in photographs.

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design, is pleased to present an artist talk with Hank Willis Thomas. Appropriation and juxtaposition are two of many strategies with which Thomas orchestrates his interdisciplinary practice. His series Unbranded (2008) uses advertisements lifted from the pages African-American interest magazines; Thomas subtly reworks them, removing key text, logos, and/or products. The skeletal remains betray immediately the subliminal prejudice common throughout consumer culture. Another series, Branded (2011), adopts a commercial vernacular to decry the commodification of African-Americans, both in contemporary sports and in the historical slave trade. A basketball player dunks into a noose, for example, or a Nike swoosh is branded onto a man’s head. Thomas’s images confront our difficult history through the universal legibility of advertising.

“Photography writer and historian David Campany will give an illustrated talk about the little-known magazine work of Walker Evans. Working as writer, editor, and designer as well as a photographer, Evans carved out a space for himself in the American press as unlikely as it was extraordinary. Setting his own assignments on everything from Sundays in London and shop displays to graffiti and unemployment, Evans made dozens of poetic and polemical photo-essays.”