Aperture Turns 75 and Revives Its 1953 Plea for Survival

Aperture will mark its seventy-fifth anniversary next year with the publication of Nothing to Lose but Photography, a book spanning seventy-five years of images and texts from the magazine's archive. The title quotes Ansel Adams, one of the founders, from the first issue. The announcement revives a piece of institutional memory: a 1953 appeal that began "Photography needs aperture, aperture needs you, and you need aperture."

The appeal worked then, and the subscriber lists prove it. Names printed in the magazine's first year included Jacob Deschin, photography critic for The New York Times; Dr. Edwin H. Land, inventor of the Polaroid process; Henry Luce, founder of Life; and photographers Laura Gilpin, Roger Mayne, and Dorothy Norman. "The other arts have important and constructive journals," the editors argued in 1953. "The first year shows the need and justifies the effort." Photography, they believed, deserved the same institutional support that painting and literature already enjoyed.

What did the first readers say?

One subscriber, a student from Rome named Robert Bright, wrote a letter the magazine has kept for seven decades: "I think the first year of Aperture has been a great success. You have given my hungry intellect a substantial meal—and for my wandering spirit you have raised a meaningful and believable signpost. It is an island of reason in a sea of shabby trumpery." The letter reads today as a small document of how the magazine positioned itself from the start: serious writing about photography, at a moment when few venues offered any.

The 1953 ask was modest and direct. Supporters were told to renew subscriptions promptly and to enlist others. In return, the magazine printed their names as sustaining and retaining subscribers. That exchange—money for public acknowledgment—built the community whose anniversary Aperture now plans to celebrate.

What does the new campaign offer?

The current appeal copies the old method almost exactly. Donors who give $100 or $500 before October 31 will have their names published on the final pages of the anniversary book, alongside others who support the foundation's work. Each donor also receives a copy of the book on publication. The foundation describes the gifts as defraying the book's significant production expenses and, at the same time, as a portrait of the community itself.

That community now has a physical home. In September 2026, Aperture opened a new space at 380 Columbus Avenue, and the celebration gathered a wide cross-section of the photographic world. Among those present, photographed by Landon Nordeman: Stephen Shore, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tina Barney, Susan Meiselas, Dawoud Bey, Deana Lawson, Mitch Epstein, Ming Smith, Justine Kurland, Ethan James Green, and Anastasia Samoylova. The magazine that began with a handful of subscribers in 1952 now counts many of the medium's central figures among its neighbors.

Where does the institution come from?

Aperture traces its origin to the 1951 Aspen Conference on Photography, documented in a photograph by Robert C. Bishop that the foundation republished with its appeal. The anniversary book will join that beginning to the present, and its title signals continuity with the founders' ambition rather than a break from it.

The foundation frames the project with two open questions: "Who could have imagined that the vision and ambition of our founders would have brought us this far? Who knows where we will go in the next seventy-five years and beyond?" The book, and the names printed at its back, will be the first measure of an answer.