Arches on Columbus, Aperture Opens a Free Gallery and Bookstore

Three arched windows face Columbus Avenue at the corner of West 78th Street. Behind them is a new bookstore stocked with photography books. Across the street, the American Museum of Natural History holds its dinosaurs and dioramas. On this side, a much younger kind of wonder has moved in.

Aperture, the nonprofit photography publisher, opened its new home at 380 Columbus Avenue on September 18. It is the first time in years that the organization has had a public room of its own in New York. The address holds a bookstore facing the avenue, a gallery, an event space, offices, and storage for prints and books. Admission is free.

The building is old enough to have its own stories. According to The Art Newspaper, it dates to 1886. Over the decades it housed a restaurant called Ocean Grill and the vintage shop Alice Underground. Aperture bought it in 2022 for $8.95 million, according to The New York Times as cited by PetaPixel. The architecture firm Levenbetts adapted the space, which runs about 10,000 square feet across two levels. West Side Rag describes exposed brick and beams, and a gallery that doubles as a 45 seat room for talks.

A Publisher Finds a Street

Aperture has been around since 1952. Its founders included Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Minor White. It began publishing books in 1965 with a volume on Edward Weston, and it has since put out more than a thousand titles. It also publishes a quarterly magazine.

For much of its life in New York, though, Aperture was something you found on a shelf or up an elevator. Its last public gallery sat on an upper floor in Chelsea. The new space is the opposite. It faces the avenue through arched windows, on a corner that already draws museum crowds.

Executive director Sarah Meister, who joined in 2021 after more than twenty five years at MoMA, has framed the move around access. She told The Art Newspaper that the book and the magazine matter because photography is a democratic medium. The building is meant to act the same way. Walk in off Columbus, browse, look, leave. Nobody asks for a ticket.

Walk in off Columbus, browse, look, leave. Nobody asks for a ticket.

The details are practical. The gallery and bookstore are open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. They are closed Monday and Tuesday. Aperture also lists a photo booth among the new features, which feels right for a place built around pictures of people.

The money is still coming in. The Art Newspaper reports a $25 million capital campaign that is close to 70 percent of the way to its goal.

Twenty Four Photographers and One City

The opening show is called Aperture Loves New York, and it runs through November 1. Meister organized it. The idea is simple. Twenty four photographers, one framed print each, leaning on picture rails and paired with the Aperture book that carried the work.

The list reads like a map of how the city has been seen. Diane Arbus is there. So are Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, and Stephen Shore. Danny Lyon, Alex Webb, and Rebecca Norris Webb bring the street. Tina Barney, Dawoud Bey, Deana Lawson, and Carrie Mae Weems bring the portrait and the private room. Coreen Simpson, Sophie Rivera, and Ernest Cole are on the wall too.

The rest of the roster pulls the story toward the present. Tyler Mitchell, Awol Erizku, Ethan James Green, Sara Cwynar, Justine Kurland, Gillian Laub, Anastasia Samoylova, Hank Willis Thomas, and Missy O'Shaughnessy round out the group. Aperture leads its exhibition page with one image, Carrie Mae Weems and her Harlem Street, made between 1976 and 1988 and published in The Heart of the Matter last year.

One print per artist sounds modest. It is also a statement about scale. This is not a blockbuster. It is a room where a single photograph sits next to the book that made it matter.

It is a fitting first show for a house that has spent more than seventy years printing pictures and now has a window to show them in. The city on those walls is the same one waiting outside the door when you leave, a little darker by then.

After the Lights Go Down

The gallery closes at six most days. The work does not stop there. Aperture has announced a season of talks, panels, and book launches for the new event space, including public conversations with Laub, Shore, and Simpson this fall and a talk by Anshika Varma, founder of Offset Projects in New Delhi. Check the calendar for dates and times.

The Upper West Side is not where most people go looking for the art world after dark. Chelsea has the openings. The Lower East Side has the late crowds. But a free photography room with a busy calendar of talks, across from one of the city's great museums, is a strong argument for heading uptown.

For more on the city's photographers who still work the late hours, read our look at street photography after dark. And if you want the full roster before you go, Aperture has posted the complete exhibition list on its site.

Go early, go on a weekday, and take your time with the shelves. The pictures are free. The books are the only thing that costs you.