How can photographs provide information at a moment when ideas about truth and power have been disrupted? The 2020 Aperture Summer Open, Information, presents new work by fourteen photographers and lens-based artists who examine globalization, technology, and politics, and the dynamic changes to personal and social identity charted by mass media today. They consider declassified military archives and CIA conspiracy theories, stage encounters with race and memory, present evidence of incarceration and violence, and visualize the physical spaces where digital information is concealed from the public eye. While some artists interrogate the construction of images themselves, others rely on the photograph’s power to cross between dream and dystopia, fact and fable. Together, they broadcast new ways of viewing our present—and our future.
Information is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor of Aperture magazine, with Farah Al Qasimi, artist; Amanda Hajjar, director of exhibitions at Fotografiska New York; Kristen Lubben, executive director of the Magnum Foundation; and Paul Moakley, editor at large for special projects at TIME.