We Make Pictures in Order to Live

This spring, Aperture magazine presents issue #250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” which explores the relationship between photography and storytelling across generations and geographies. Featuring visual stories that excite, surprise, and illuminate daily life, this issue’s title is a nod to the late, celebrated writer Joan Didion, who declared, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Aperture contributors explore the quiet poetry— or clamorous disorder—of the everyday, and attest that making photographs is a way of being alive.

In a sweeping introductory essay, Brian Dillon asks how we might view Didion through photography, and what images come to mind when we think of her writing. Thessaly La Force profiles Bieke Depoorter, who sees documentary photography both as a listening exercise and a form of investigation, blurring the lines between authorship, fiction, and truth. Alistair O’Neill takes stock of Nick Waplington’s vibrant records of subcultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Lena Fritsch writes about the “exquisite world-making” of photographer Eikoh Hosoe’s collaborative practice. Tiana Reid reconsiders Charles “Teenie” Harris’s vivid, midcentury portraits of Black life in Pittsburgh, several of which are published for the first time in this issue.