In 2022 Condé Nast featured the story “A Portrait of Bravery: Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine” on the cover of Vogue magazine. The issue included portraits taken by the world-famous photographer Annie Leibovitz showing Zelenska sitting at a table with her husband, the president of Ukraine, in an official office room or standing in front of the wreckage of army equipment with Ukrainian soldiers. The framing, lighting, staging, and the couple’s clothing are oriented on the visual language and aesthetics that Leibovitz has established in her work over the last decades: nothing is left to chance, and every gesture seems coordinated.

The publication of the pictures led to debates in various social networks that questioned the pictures’ content and context, asking if it was acceptable for an American photographer to be flown into Ukraine for the sole purpose of taking pictures of this sort for a Western magazine. This resulted in a discussion about images that are created in wartime and serve different national and international functions.

“For a moment it might seem macabre and useless to consider operating modes of journalistic photography through catastrophes—of all things—but it is often traumatic events and omnipresent images of them that expose these structures to begin with.”

—Florian Ebner, Centre Pompidou, 2010

Crossing Lines examined the distribution, circulation, and mechanisms of photographic image on three levels. What images are communicated to a society through news channels or social media? Who guarantees and takes responsibility for the authenticity of images that reach our smartphones in real time today? What visual worlds are generated to make statements? When does the content of an image become propaganda for political statements?

The exhibition presented over 150 photographs and video installations by twenty international artists.
Curators: Kateryna Radchenko (Odesa Photo Days) and Felix Hoffmann (Artistic Director, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN)

Exhibition coproduced by Aperture and Paris Photo

Paris Photo and Aperture Celebrate Their Tenth Anniversary

The Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award, which was initiated in November 2012, acknowledges the contribution of photo books to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.

The prizes are awarded in two phases. A first jury meets in New York to select which entries to include in the short lists for each category. The award recipients in each category are then chosen from the jury’s list, which will be exhibited at Paris Photo in its entirety. After Paris Photo, an exhibition of the full shortlisted book including the winners was exhibited at the following venues:

Paris Photo, November 2022
Printed Matter, New York, January 2023
Medium Photo Festival, San Diego, April 2023
Copenhagen Photo Festival, June 2023
Foto Wien, Wien, June 2023
The Reference, Seoul, June 2023
Lightbox Photo Library, Taipei, August 2023
Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal, September 2023
Istituto Italiano di Fotografi, Milan, October 2023

Since 2012, nearly one thousand new books have been submitted in the three categories of this prize every year. This collection of over nine thousand books includes photo books from over sixty-five countries and serves as an incomparable resource for photographers, scholars, and curators and providing an overview of the enormous number of photo books produced today.