NEW YORK, NY.- For over thirty years, the New York Times Magazine has presented the myriad possibilities and applications of photography. Aperture is pleased to present The New York Times Magazine Photographs, a joint publication and exhibition that reflect upon and interrogate the very nature of both photography and print magazines at this pivotal moment in their history and evolution.

The New York Times Magazine Photographs exhibition premiered this July at the prestigious Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in France. The exhibition is cocurated by Kathy Ryan, longtime Photo Editor of the Magazine, and Lesley A. Martin, Publisher of Aperture Books. The Aperture-produced exhibition is comprised of eleven individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that have been presented in the pages of the Magazine. The featured projects mirror the Magazine’s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage, portraiture, as well as fine art photography. Using visual materials drawn from different stages of the commissioning process—shot lists, work prints and contact sheets, videos, tear sheets, and framed prints—the Magazine’s collaborative methodology is revealed from initial idea to the published page, and, in some cases, continues beyond magazine publication, when an exploration that began as an assignment has become a part of a photographer’s ongoing work. In sum, these layers reveal the Magazine’s unique position as a venue for visual storytelling and a unique forum for the cross-pollination of photographic genres.

An accompanying satellite exhibition, The New York Times Magazine Tear Sheets, will be on view nearby at the festival.The complementary exhibit will present a selection of the NewYork Times Magazine story layouts, reproduced in the context of their original publication and in chronological order, giving the viewer a sense of how these photographs worked on the page and in relation to other images.

Later this fall, Aperture will release the highly anticipated book of the same name, featuring 500 images by 140 of the key image-makers of our time. Edited by Kathy Ryan, with a preface by former editor of the magazine Gerald Marzorati, this stunning, extensive volume presents some of the finest commissioned photographs worldwide in four sections: reportage, portraiture, style, and conceptual photography, including photo illustration. Diverse in content and sensibility, and consistent in virtuosity, the photographs are accompanied by reproduced tear sheets to allow for the examination of sequencing and the interplay between text and image, simultaneously presenting the work while illuminating its distillation to magazine form. This process is explored further through texts offering behind-the-scenes perspectives and anecdotes by the many photographers, writers, editors, and other collaborators whose voices have been a part of the Magazine over the years.