| | | | Vince Aletti: The Drawer
 The acclaimed curator’s scrapbook celebration of the beauty of photography and the printed pageAmerican critic and curator Vince Aletti has been collecting photographs printed on the pages of magazines and books since the 1970s. “For as long as I can remember,” he says, “one of the first things I do in a new apartment is pin pictures to the wall. It’s always been a way of claiming space, of making it my own. But even after I’ve settled in, I keep a wall where constellations of push-pinned images change regularly. Many of those pictures have been with me for decades; others are new—torn from the pages of the latest Artforum or i-D, or clipped from the sports section of the Times. Nearly all of those images come from or end up in one overflowing flat-file drawer in my East Village apartment.”
That drawer, with its hundreds of stacked tearsheets, newspaper clippings, gallery announcements and other ephemera, is documented in a new book entitled, simply and inevitably, The Drawer. Aletti’s 75 multilayered compositions are testimony to the author’s unique ability to voice the complexity and variety of desire, personal and collective histories, and the power of art to reflect and shape who we are.
Vince Aletti (born 1945) is a critic and curator based in New York. Previously the art editor and photography critic at the Village Voice from 1987 to 2005, he later wrote weekly exhibition reviews for the New Yorker and contributed regularly to other publications such as Artforum and Vogue Italia. He is the author of several books, including Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines and The Disco Files 1973–78.
PRAISE AND REVIEWSi-D Alex Merola Flexing a kaleidoscope of genres, eras and subjects, all juxtaposed and overlapped with rhythmic intuition, The Drawer’s pages offer up some wonderful associative games for both the eyes and mind. Photobooth strips next to pages from 50s movie magazines; erotic pin-ups next to Antonioni film stills. However, this is no cabinet of curiosities, but rather, as Vince calls it, a “diary”, giving voice to a variety of histories, memories and desires. Artforum Zack Hatfield Warburgian juxtapositions of high and low, iconic and unknown. Mapped out over the course of a single afternoon, the book is a meditation on how images shape desire, a remedy to the cold calculations of the algorithm, and the wordless memoir of a great and grateful eye. Aperture Evan Moffitt Together, these images form a history of homoeroticism. Good enough to lock away, The Drawer is even more irresistible to open. Dazed Millen Brown-Ewens The Drawer reads like an astounding catalogue of male beauty. One in which presentations of masculinity are experienced through a homosocial gaze. Artnet William Van Meter Aletti’s assemblage captures a portrait of the man himself. It’s a window into his tastes and passions, and a look at what moves him. Frieze Dan Fox The Drawer gives a vivid feel for these images as physical, printed matter. It makes you want to sift and dig. Blind Sara Rosen The Drawer is a lavish affair that pays homage to the magnificent expanse of broadsheets in their prime. Like buried treasure, the images from Aletti’s collection are priceless gems that spark memories of a beautiful, sexy, glamorous past when printed matter ruled the planet. |
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| | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/1/2023 Featured spreads are from Vince Aletti’s The Drawer—the renowned critic and curator’s intuitively-designed scrapbook of printed and often mass-produced images that have spoken to him since the 1970s. Drawn from his legendary collection of magazine and newspaper clippings, gallery announcements, and other well circulated ephemera, erotica and promotional materials, these source images take on new life in the oversized and notably text-free, uncoated pages of this pitch-perfect compendium—where the high/low juxtapositions convey a unique intelligence and sensibility that can only have come from a life of passionate looking. continue to blog | FORTHCOMING AND RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS |  | FRAENKEL GALLERYISBN: 9781881337232
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