Aperture No. 260 – The Seoul Issue (Fall 2025)

Aperture No. 260 is the Seoul issue, part of the magazine's series on photography in different cities. It looks at how photographers have documented, and taken part in, the many changes of a megacity shaped by millennia of tradition and a future still being written. Topics range from the influence of K-beauty to the recovery of Korean history, and from recent political protests to the tensions of a divided peninsula, with perspectives from several generations.

The features cover Heinkuhn Oh's portraits of state and self, the way the photographic gaze has shaped Seoul's political landscape, and how artists respond to a city of hallucinatory surfaces. They also follow six decades of Space magazine and Seoul's changing skyline, Youngsook Park and the feminist tradition she forged in 1960s Korea, and the collector Bohnchang Koo, who brings forgotten histories to life. Yezoi Hwang records the uprising of a city in crisis, Doyeon Gwon explores Seoul's entanglements with animals, Chorong An evokes life under the regime of K-beauty, and Sung Jin Park's teenage spirit gets its own feature. Nikki S. Lee is profiled, with the question of whether she can reinvent herself in her hometown after taking Manhattan. Heeseung Chung, whose work is on the cover, lingers in the spaces between images, and Suntag Noh takes on the dark absurdism of the Korean divide.

The columns include Stephen Shore on the challenges of the color red and a closing piece in which novelist Ed Park discusses his alternate history of Korea. The PhotoBook Review has Zack Hatfield in conversation with Yorgos Lanthimos, plus reviews of photobooks by Guy Bourdin, Christine Furuya-Gössler, Malick Sidibé and others.