Following Aperture’s acclaimed city issues centered around photography in Delhi, Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and São Paulo, the magazine’s Fall edition considers Accra as a site of vivid photographic styles connected to visual culture in Ghana and West Africa. From the pioneering midcentury studio photography and photojournalism of James Barnor to the sensitive and experimental work of Eric Gyamfi, Accra is at the center of dialogues around Pan-Africanism and is a point of return for the African Diaspora. The Accra issue, edited in collaboration with Lyle Ashton Harris and Nii Obodai, may include contributions from Ekow Eshun, John Akomfrah, David Adjaye, Taiye Selasi, Lloyd Foster, Anakwa Dwamena, and Rénee Mussai.

With a nod to the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Aperture’s winter issue delves into how photographs function as products, expressions, and catalysts of all manner of desire, from the romantic to the material to the fantastical. Features include a profile of the evocative but understudied work of Imai Hisae; the feminist self-portraiture of Melissa Shook; a conversation with the provocative fashion photographer Juergen Teller on the occasion of a major exhibition in Paris; a look at the latest work of Jonathas de Andrade, one of Brazil’s most renowned contemporary artists; and a deep dive into the archive of Ohtsubo Kosen, who combines Ikebana craft and photography with beguiling results.

This fall, Aperture magazine presents an issue exploring the idea of cosmologies-the origins, histories, and local universes that artists create for themselves. In an exclusive interview, Greg Tate speaks to Deana Lawson about how her monumental staged portraits trace cosmologies of the African diaspora. "What I'm doing integrates mythology, religion, empirical data, dreams," says Lawson, whose work is the subject of major solo exhibitions this year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In an in-depth profile of Judith Joy Ross and her iconic portraiture, Rebecca Bengal shows how a constellation of strangers is brought together through Ross's precise, empathic gaze. "Ross is guided by a rapt, intense, wholehearted belief in the individual," Bengal writes. A portfolio of Michael Schmidt's acutely observed work from the 1970s and '80s reveals the realms within realms of a once divided Berlin, while Feng Li's surprising black-and-white snapshots zigzag between absurdist dramas in various Chinese cities. Ashley James distills the surreal visions of Awol Erizku's still lifes and tableaux; Casey Gerald contributes a sweeping ode to Baldwin Lee's stirring 1980s portraits of Black Southern subjects; and Pico Iyer meditates on Tom Sandberg's grayscales marked by both absence and reverence. Throughout "Cosmologies," artists cast their attention on the great mysteries of both personal and shared lineages, tracking their locations in space, time, and history, and reminding us of the elegant enigmas that can be unraveled close to home.

Aperture magazine presents "Celebrations," an issue that considers how photographs envision ceremonies, festivities' and allow us to discover euphoria in the everyday. Throughout the issue, photographers portray exuberance against a backdrop of political strife in Beirut, pursue the thrill of wanderlust, excavate family histories, and respond to the powerful, constant urge to gather. Whether in Kinshasa's vibrant nightlife of the 1950s and '60s or London's sweaty dance floors of our era, jubilation carries on, despite an ongoing, and unpredictable, pandemic. In "Celebrations," Lynne Tillman contributes a survey of landmark images of celebration through the years, by artists from Malick Sidibe and Peter Hujar to LaToya Ruby Frazier. Several profiles and essays-including Alistair O'Neill on Jamie Hawkesworth, Moeko Fuiji on Rinko Kawauchi, Tiana Reid on Shikeith, Mona El Tahawy on Miriam Boulos, and Anakwa Dwamena on Marilyn Nance's views of Lagos, Nigeria during FESTAC '77-reveal the celebratory gestures embedded in vibrant portraiture, serene slants of light, unbound queer desire, and joyous cross-cultural exchange.

On Contested Terrain is published on the occasion of the first comprehensive exhibition of An-My Le's work, organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art. Throughout her career, Le has photographed sites of former battlefields, spaces reserved for training for or reenacting war, and the noncombatant roles of active service members. She is part of a lineage of photographers who have adapted the conventions of landscape photography to address the human traces of history and conflict, but is one of the few who have experienced the sights and sounds associated with growing up in a warzone. The publication includes selections from Viet Nam (1994-98), a series made on Le's return, twenty years after her family was evacuated by the US military and 29 Palms (2003-4), made on the eponymous military base built as a training ground during the Iraq War. It will also include many new and never-before-published images. Texts by curators Dan Leers and Lisa Sutcliffe and an interview between Le and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, address how Le's work complicates the landscapes of conflict that have long informed American identity.

In role-play and sex-play, illuminating theater, jokes, leisure, and fantasy. This edition of Aperture focuses on "Playtime." Taking its name from the 1967 film by Jacques Tati, the articles and portfolios explore how photography illuminates, facilitates, and participates in the many definitions of play-from role-play and sex-play to theater and jokes to leisure and fantasy. The issue features an interview with artist Chrisian Marclay about improvisation and the relationship between images and sounds; a conversation with Erwin Wurm about the possibilities and risks of using humor in contemporary art; and new, never-before-published work by Sophie Calle. Additionally, writer Eric Banks visits Saul Leiter's studio; Tim Davis examines the art of the photographic one-liner; Robin Kelsey surveys the artists who turned to games, whimsy, and clowning around in the 1960s and '70s; and Aveek Sen considers Italo Calvino's short story "The Adventure of a Photographer." Plus portfolios from Jo Ann Callis, Kauyoshi Usui, Bruno Munari, James Mollison, a little-known group of Cambridge University students who scaled campus buildings in the 1930s, and more.

This winter, Aperture magazine presents an issue that celebrates the dynamic visions of Latinx photography across the United States. Guest edited by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, “Latinx” spans a century of image making, connecting historical and contemporary photography, and covering the themes of political resistance, family and community, fashion and culture, and the complexity of identity in American life. In “Latinx,” Carribean Fragoza traces Laura Aguilar’s influence on queer artmaking. Joiri Minaya remixes postcards from the Dominican Republic to unveil the fantasy of tourism. Christina Catherine Martinez profiles Reynaldo Rivera, who chronicled 1990s-era Los Angeles nightlife. Yxta Maya Murry considers three Latina curators and writers influencing how photography canons are made today. “Collectively, their images cast a greater net for the multiple ways of seeing Latinx people,” Tompkins Rivas notes of the issue’s photographers, “creating a visual archive whose edges are yet to be defined.”