Images of blackness have become important in our understanding of the modern world because they reflect and shape the way black people are perceived and represented. In Black Meme Legacy Russell explores the role of these images in the construction of black identity and visual culture, from the early days of film and photography to the digital age. The first ever film was a black jockey riding a horse in 1887. The very first screen kiss was between two black actors in Lime Kiln Day, 1913. Black Meme also explores lynching postcards that were common in the 1920s, the image of Emmot Till's body in the casket and Trayvon's hoodie, the grainy video of Rodney King and the gloss of Michael Jackson' Thriller, Diamond Reynolds's Facebook live recording of her boyfriend's killing by the police, and Beyonce's Formation. Legacy Russell, the award winning author of Glitch Feminism, explores the power of these tokens and argues that without the contributions of black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form.

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) is a chronicle of survival by trailblazing artist Zora J Murff. Murff constructs a manual for coming to terms with the historic and contemporary realities of America's divisive structures of privilege and caste. Since leaving social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, Murff's work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts. True Colors continues that work, expanding to address the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff identifies as "the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me-of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image." Nuanced, challenging, and inspiring, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) is a must-have monograph by a rising and standout artist. True Colors is the result of the inaugural Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, with the generous support of 7G Foundation. An exhibition of the work will open at Baxter St in New York in November 2021.

“IN MANY LANGUAGES, ‘UNDERSTANDING’ ALSO COMES FROM THE IDEA OF PUTTING SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR BODY” – CAMILLE HENROT Over the past twenty years, Camille Henrot has developed a critically acclaimed practice that moves seamlessly between drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and film. Mother Tongue is Henrot’s first publication focused solely on painting and drawing, bringing together over 200 works from the series System of Attachment, Wet Job, and Soon, created between 2018 and 2022. This recent body of work addresses the ambivalent nature of care and the tension between the simultaneous developmental need for attachment and independence, beginning at infancy and continuing throughout life. Her deeply personal and intimate interrogations ultimately relate to broader questions such as the expectations placed on mothers and the representation of the female body. This richly illustrated catalogue is accompanied by texts from Emily LaBarge, Legacy Russell, Marcus Steinweg, Hélene Cixous, Seamus Kealy, and a conversation with Camille Henrot and curator Julika Bosch.