Aperture's new exhibition space opens with Aperture Loves New York, an inaugural installation organized by Executive Director Sarah Meister that gathers photographs by more than twenty artists—from Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore to Awol Erizku and Justine Kurland—alongside the Aperture books that carried their work into the world. The show traces a reciprocal relationship: photographers who shaped the city's image, and were shaped by it in turn. It remains on view through November 1, 2026.

Tina Barney contributes The Reception (1985), from Family Ties (2024). In a wood-paneled room hung with paintings and ornamented with flowers, figures in formal dress gather for what seems a celebration, yet their gazes slide away from one another and the seating feels oddly tense. Barney's large-scale color photographs look effortless but are carefully constructed, using the language of the family portrait to reveal what manners conceal: hierarchy, intimacy, impatience. Made in mid-1980s New York—an era of sharpened wealth, display, and social choreography—the picture turns privilege into a subject and the "nice" occasion into something charged and unsettled.

Ernest Cole's photograph of Harlem, ca. 1968, from The True America (2024), captures the city in motion: two women stride through the frame in bright patterned clothing, their faces crisp against a gentle smear of traffic and storefront signs. Cole had fled South Africa in 1966 to publish House of Bondage (1967), his devastating photobook on apartheid, reissued by Aperture in 2022. Living in exile, he turned his camera toward Black life in America—attentive to style, dignity, and the everyday theater of the sidewalk. Seen in the turbulent late 1960s, after civil rights victories and at the height of the Black Power movement, the photograph suggests both joy and urgency.

Awol Erizku shows an image made for The New Yorker, depicting three kufis designed by Ruth E. Carter for Spike Lee's Malcolm X—two embroidered for Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X's sometime mentor, and one for an assistant. Set against a roiling, clouded backdrop, the hats read like small constellations, charged with the weight of history carried by everyday objects. Erizku, included in Mystic Parallax (2023), may be best known for his 2017 portrait of Beyoncé announcing her twin pregnancy. He moves fluidly between editorial commissions and a studio practice that reroutes art-historical forms, pop vernacular, and spiritual iconography.

Robert Frank's New York, 1955–65, from The Americans (published by Aperture in 1968; the new edition dates from 2024), turns a street corner into a study of attitude. Three young people lean against what may be a storefront; one meets the camera head-on, one half-hides behind a hand, one looks caught between performance and fatigue. Behind them a sign warns "DON'T MISS," while spikes on the railing hint the spectacle could have an edge. Frank, Swiss-born and living in New York, developed here the restless, off-kilter style that would reshape documentary photography. "When I was young, I could walk around, day after day, and hunt for pictures," he said in a 2015 interview.

Nan Goldin's Trixie on the cot (1979), from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986/2021), photographs a room with startling directness: a hard overhead light, a bar cot, a figure resting on it in a dress and heels. Goldin, who moved to New York in 1978, made pictures from within a "chosen family" of friends and lovers rather than looking in from outside—recording desire, tenderness, glamour, and collapse. Those images became slideshows set to music, then her landmark book, a visual diary that helped redefine documentary intimacy.

Justine Kurland's Playground (1998), from Girl Pictures (2020), turns an everyday scene into something quietly cinematic: girls clustered around the swings, one in motion, the others negotiating the serious politics of attention and belonging. The series, made between 1997 and 2002, overturned the adventure stories that typically feature boys. "I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals," Kurland has said.

Danny Lyon, born in New York in 1942, contributes 80 and 82 Beekman Street (1967), from The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Aperture's 2020 facsimile of his original 1969 photobook). Cast-iron facades still stand, streets gape with absence, demolition debris gathers at the edges. A lone figure crosses the frame as if passing through a city already becoming a memory. Lyon chronicled the "slum clearance" demanded by vast civic projects like the original World Trade Center—pictures that feel like both record and eulogy.

Sophie Rivera's Waitress (ca. 1978), from Double Exposures (2026), frames a server front-on against a dark wall so that bow tie, lapels, and white apron read almost like costume. The expression is steady but hard to place—professional, guarded, a little weary. Made as Rivera was developing a photography rooted in Nuyorican life, the picture turns everyday labor into a direct encounter.

Coreen Simpson closes the selection with The Fantastic Four, Double Dutch Champions, Lincoln Center, NYC (1980). Four young champions stand shoulder-to-shoulder, knees bent, ready; the jump rope cuts across the frame like a drawn line. Each face meets the camera with a different mix of cool, focus, and challenge. Simpson covered New York's cultural life from the late 1970s onward, bringing editorial tools to scenes mainstream coverage often overlooked—and capturing girls' street culture alongside the early hip-hop era's emphasis on crew, stance, and self-making in public.

The installation doubles as a compact history of Aperture's publishing program, from The Americans to Double Exposures, and stakes the foundation's claim for its new space: that the book and the wall, together, still shape how photography enters the culture. Where the program goes next, after this autumn's New York panorama, will say much about the institution's ambitions.