WHAT TIME IS IT?

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Check out reviews in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cultured, The Brooklyn Rail, and El País

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Listen to interviews on The Selection Committee Radio Show and the PhotoWork podcast

Read interviews in Lunate, Indy Week, and Photo-Eye

“A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling,

the time of its subsequent rediscovery.” —Rebecca Bengal

New York, May 16, 2023—Aperture announces the publication of writer Rebecca Bengal’s Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, the first collection of her essays and profiles, all of which bring us closer to pioneering artists and the personal and political stories surrounding their images. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.
 
In Strange Hours, Bengal contemplates the narrative power in Judith Joy Ross’s transcendent portraiture and imagines a short story accompanying Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative early portraits in New York, explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US, reconsiders the legacy of Walker Evans and James Agee in American culture, and traces the line between fiction and truth in the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets’s profound meditation on the war in Ukraine.
 
As the acclaimed novelist Joy Williams writes in her foreword to the book, “The photographs that accompany Rebecca Bengal’s texts in Strange Hours make an often elusive, if satisfying, pairing with her nimble insights, interviews, encounters, and assessments of an eclectic range of artists from brash William Eggleston to melancholy William Gedney, from the rough downtown hipster scene of Nan Goldin to the Argentine animals in the work of Alessandra Sanguinetti.” Featuring vivid, full-color reproductions of classic images by Eggleston, Goldin, Curran Hatleberg, Ming Smith, RaMell Ross, and others, Strange Hours announces Bengal as one of the most compelling writers about photography in our time.

Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists is edited by Brendan Embser, Senior Managing Editor, Aperture magazine, with assistant editor Varun Nayar, and is available at aperture.org/books.

Public Programs
Gatherings planned in celebration of Strange Hours include author events at McNally Jackson Books Seaport, New York, on June 29, and at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn on July 19. For details and registration visit aperture.org/events.

Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction, essays, and documentary journalism about art, literature, film, music, and the environment. A regular contributor to Aperture, her writing has been published in the Paris Review, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection. A MacDowell fellow in fiction and a former editor at Vogue, Bengal holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Originally from western North Carolina, Bengal lives in Brooklyn.
 
Joy Williams (foreword) is the author of several collections of short stories and essays, and four novels, including The Quick and the Dead (2010) and Harrow (2021).
 
Aperture Ideas: Artists and Writers on Photography, a series of essay collections devoted to essential voices in the field, includes bestselling titles by Geoff Dyer, Philip Gefter, Vicki Goldberg, Fred Ritchin, and David Levi Strauss.

Book Details
5 ¼ × 8 ¼ in. (13.3 × 21 cm)
216 pages
25 duotone images
Paperback
Design by Pacific
ISBN 978-1-59711-554-4
US $29.95 / CDN $41.95 / UK £22.00
June 2023
aperture.org/books

About Aperture
Aperture, a not-for-profit, connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person, and online. Created in 1952 by photographers and writers as “common ground for the advancement of photography,” Aperture today is a multiplatform publisher and center for the photo community. From its base in New York, Aperture produces, publishes, and presents a variety of photography projects and programs—locally, across the United States, and around the world.

Strange Hours was made possible, in part, with generous support from the Besson/Cooper Fund, FotoFocus, Michael Hoeh, and Charlotte Carroll Tracy.