Vince Aletti — The Drawer

Vince Aletti's collection of printed photographs, laid out in seventy-five layered compositions.

Aletti, a New York critic and curator, has been gathering photographs as they appear in books and magazines since the 1970s. They pile up in a drawer of an old plan chest in his East Village apartment: hundreds of tearsheets, press clippings, gallery cards and other printed ephemera, recorded in a book here for the first time.

From 1987 to 2005 he was art editor and photography critic at the Village Voice, and his writing has also appeared in Artforum, Vogue Italia and the New Yorker. His earlier books include Issues (Phaidon, 2019), on photography in fashion magazines.

The Drawer won PhotoBook of the Year in the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture awards, where one of the jurors, Alexis Fabry, described it as a record of decades of New York photography seen by someone close to its centre. In 2024 White Columns in New York showed tabletop arrangements from the same collection under the book's title.

SPBH Editions, 2022. 144 pages, softcover with dust jacket, perfect bound, 28 x 37.7 cm.