Peter Kunhardt

The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism. Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them. Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times.

First published in 1911, The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln was privately printed by Frederick Hill Meserve, the preeminent historian of the photographs of Abraham Lincoln. It was a groundbreaking look at the then-known photographs of the sixteenth president of the United States, who was the first president to be photographed while in office. In the decades that followed, Meserve made new discoveries and updated the information that was known about each image. He published an expanded edition in 1944, collaborating with the Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg. This new work, published on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's death, is an update to Meserve's original biographical documentation, and includes 114 portraits. Here we see Lincoln's striking face, photographed over a span of 20 years (1846-65). Published with the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation, this new iteration of The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln reflects not only Meserve's pioneering research, but the work of the many Lincoln scholars who followed in his footsteps and the work of five generations of Meserve's family who advanced his scholarship. The new volume is edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., the executive director of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation, who brings his expertise on Lincoln, having previously coauthored two titles on the president. This new edition of The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln is an essential and intimate collection of portraits of the legendary president, and an important volume for American archival and photographic history.