What:
Aperture, a very busy not-for-profit foundation, is a multi-platform publisher connecting photographers and their audiences with the most inspiring work and the best ideas.

Aperture magazine publishes four issues each year and these are filled with the most inspiring photography and writing on photography. They also publish between twelve and fifteen new photobooks, and books about photography, each year, with a growing digital publishing program, including e-books, apps, and a daily blog, as well as online features on their website. They have thus far published over 650 books.

Aperture 208 Magazine, Fall 2012

Additionally, they have a regular program of exhibitions each year, at their gallery in New York and at partner venues, touring to museums and other photography centers nationally and internationally. In their shop, Aperture sell approximately twenty-five print editions each year, many by emerging photographers, aimed at collectors and published to support their programs, and the photographers they work with.

Why we like it:
As if all that was not enough, Aperture host an annual Portfolio Prize, recognizing and promoting the most exciting emerging photographers internationally, and Paris Photo, an annual PhotoBook Award recognizing the contribution of photographers’ books.

Aperture 208 Magazine, Fall 2012

Aperture are celebrating their sixtieth anniversary in 2012 with exhibitions, publications and a Gala. See here for more details.

Find out more:
Website | Blog | Twitter

To celebrate our first 50 days of the new-look Central Station, we showcased an artists a day. Here are our selected 50 artists in 50 days:

Emmi Keane is a young designer based in Glasgow. Her designs were recently selected by the Glasgow Youth Film Festival Youth Team for the 2012 brochure after a tough competition featuring all members of Tramway’s Young Artists.  Emmi’s interests lie mainly in illustration.  Her artistic loves include Stabilo fine tip pens, fashion designer Helen Story, Turner-Prize-winning painter Tomma Abts and penguins.  In the near future Emmi aspires to go to art school to further her already promising career as a designer.

60 Seconds with Emmi…

Q. Tell us a bit about yourself?

Ah, tricky question! I moved to Glasgow from Cardiff when I was 9, I am 17 now and I love Scotland! I am currently doing a portfolio preparation course to help me get into art school. I like clothes with animals on them. His Dark Materials are my favourite books and I have a thing for contrasting colours and intricate illustrations.

Q.    How did you get involved with GYFF 2012?

I love the Glasgow Film Theatre and have friends that are involved with GYFF so when my tutor at the Visual Arts Studio told us about the opportunity to design the programme cover and poster, I jumped at it.

Q.    What inspired your design?

After chatting to some of the festival organizers I had an idea of what they wanted out of the design: something that represented youth but still appealed to most people. Picture frames and screens made an interesting medium to exhibit all the film stills that would be shown at the festival. I sketched out how I wanted the frames to be positioned with the intention to photograph real frames and compile them but I liked the sketch and thought the hand drawings would enhance the design.

Q.    How was it seeing your finished design in your hands?

Pretty surreal! Even now I will see the programme or walk past the poster and think, “Hmm, that looks familiar …” before realising it is actually my design.

Q.    What do you plan to do next?

At the moment I am applying to art schools with the hope of studying communication design or illustration. Fingers crossed!

Q.    What film do you recommend seeing at GYFF?

Umm, it’s going to have to be Napoleon Dynamite. I’ve only seen the final dance scene and it’s truly awesome so I can’t wait to see the whole thing on the big screen.

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The Glasgow Youth Film Festival is offering Central Station followers 2 pairs of tickets to see Dragonslayer at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Wed, 15 Feb.

Dragonslayer is an evocative portrait of California’s outsider skate culture, winner of two prizes at the world’s coolest film festival SXSW, last year.

If you fancy winning a free ticket for you and a friend, leave us a message  in the comments below or tweet us mentioning @censta & @glasgowyouth. The deadline for entries is Tues, 7 Feb & winners will be notified by Fri, 10 Feb.

Here’s a bit of a preview to whet your appetite…

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This year, the book festival was brave. It did things it had never done before. In a time where funding is being pulled left, right and centre, it would be easy for an established festival like the EIBF to stick to their guns, sit on their laurels and hide, but they didn’t.

Instead, they brought out a programme that was rich and varied, with more of my favourite writers than I have ever seen before (and that’s after working for  four literary festivals over six years) and a selection of exciting new events.

From Unbound, which filled the Spiegeltent with music, writing and tons of people every night, to their fantastic guest selectors, to their fantastic social media presence, they were really on the ball. They showed what a book festival could do.

As the Booker prize was announced today it made me sad that they did not take risks with their selection. There was no Mitchell, no Christos Tsiolkas, no spark. Though I appreciate the work that literary novelists do, I ultimately believe that authors who appeal to a wide audience do  great things too.  Be it Scarlett Thomas or (dare I say it) Stephenie Meyer, these guys are really reaching and affecting a large group of people. Neil Gaiman tells a great story about how he was once asked by a literary novelist at a festival how he made his living, to which he replied, ‘I write books’. The novelist was incredulous that Gaiman could support himself solely through his writing. This is something that has really stuck with me.  It makes me happy, then, to see the Guardian running the Not the Booker prize, which allows people to nominate the books they feel are deserving of acclaim. The shortlist is currently being contended, but you can read the original longlist here.

Seeing the range of books submitted for consideration is joyful; just look at it! Comics sit happily next to literary novels, which in turn are making friends with science fiction stalwarts and popular fiction.  It’s very similar to what you see in this year’s book festival programme, and it’s a trend I hope to see continuing.

And so I am going to look forward, to when the winter is over, when Charlotte Square has been re-sod, and my bones stop hurting.  I can’t wait to see what next year’s book festival, and Not the Booker, bring us..

Image: Martin Creed still from Work No. 732: Flower Kicking, 2007  © Martin Creed. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

It’s difficult to know what to make of Martin Creed. The artist, most famous for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, alternates between dead pan humour and deep sincerity (with one often impossible to distinguish from the other). And his work is much the same; it is at once playful yet also challenges everyday perceptions. Take for example Work No. 850, where Creed set up runners to sprint, every 30 seconds, through the Tate. The artist said that the regularity of the running was something that might offer comfort to the spectator, yet at the same time the piece represents an almost violent disruption to the formality of the gallery space, not to mention a display of cheeky, childlike audacity.

This mixture of fun and intrigue has made Creed a popular artist among audiences and critics alike and his latest exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh will no doubt be a popular destination this Festival season. Down Over Up is a collection of Creed’s work which reveals the artist’s fascination with steps and increments. Alongside work from the last few years, the show includes a new piece by Creed: a musical staircase where each step is another note in a scale progressing up or down depending on whether you’re ascending or descending. Creed is also working on a commission as part of the refurbishment of the Scotsman steps – a public stairwell in Edinburgh which connects the Old Town and the New Town, due to be unveiled in the new year.

If that isn’t enough, Creed is also bringing his ballet (Work No. 1020), first performed at Sadler’s Wells last year, to the Traverse Theatre between 8 – 15 August and is speaking at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 16 August about the release of two new books on his work.

I spoke to Creed last week, in between rehearsals for his performance at the Traverse, about the events he’s involved in in Edinburgh this summer, his latest commission to transform the Scotsman steps and why we might soon be seeing the Martin Creed opera show.

Image: Martin Creed, Down Over Up at The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2010

You’re in the middle of rehearsals for the ballet at the moment, is that right?

Last night was the first preview performance, which was effectively a dress rehearsal really because we’ve only had three days of rehearsals, so we’re kind of rehearsing while we do it!

Did it go well?

Aye, aye. Yeah it was just a really long day, so it’s tiring. Especially the ballet, because I’m in the ballet. But I think doing things like that for me is a chance to see what it’s like to be a thing that people are looking at, which is what my work is. It’s also different being with an audience in a room seated, not in a gallery where the audience is just coming and going and there’s no specific time that things happen.

Do you see the ballet as an extension of your piece with the runners through the Tate? There are similar ideas for example the presence and movement of the body…

Aye, that’s where it came from. You can think of the running as a really simple dance in which you’re just trying to move your body as fast as it can (because the runners at the Tate were running as fast as they could). It was that that got me into so called ‘dance’, in the sense of movements that are choreographed.

The ballet has five ballet dancers but it also has five band members who are playing the music for the dancers. One of the ideas for me is that when you’ve got five ballet dancers there on stage [and] 5 regular people next to them the people with the unchoreographed movements can look funny and diverting.

You’ve said before that it’s important for you to work across many different mediums (and the ballet being one example of that). Are there any others you’d like to explore? Online? Opera?

Yeah, I’d like to do an opera! The ballet is kind of… although it’s called ballet it contains singing, for me that’s a chance to do lots of bits and pieces. But that is on my list of one of the things I’d like to do is work with singers, trained singers. At the moment I’ve been working with me singing and other band members.

What sort of conversations did you have with Fiona Bradley at the Fruitmarket in preparation for the current exhibition there? 

She put out a list of works and I kind of said yes and added some that I thought might be good and maybe took one away and she took one away and added something and that’s how it went. She put together the main list, because the Scotsman steps [commission] kind of came from the Fruitmarket as well so I think that’s how the steps thing started because we were working on this steps commission and she was saying ‘Oh there’s all these steps in your work’ so why not make the show, so that’s how it started and I think it’s true, there are lots of steps and increments.

Are you interested in how audiences interpret and interact with your work?

Yeah definitely, in the sense that I want people to like or love my work, me and my work. In a sense I think that I make my work because I want to be loved, so I want people to like my work because that makes me feel good. But I don’t understand how it does all work… I don’t know exactly what it is that I want from people. I know that other people are really important. I don’t think I can find out about my work until I put it into public.

Tell me about the Scotsman Steps project…

They’re renovating it and they wanted an artist to do something. I proposed to actually do the steps rather than doing something on the walls and to do them in marble so that each step is made from a different type of marble. I hope it will be like a beautiful array of all the possible different colours ad textures of marble that you can get. I did make a piece with tiles of marbles, so in a way that was an earlier version which led to this.

When you get into colours of marble there are some really good pink and blue and green marbles but a lot of them are beige. So you could have a staircase of loads of different types of marble but actually they could all be brown, beige and white and I want it to really be a full contrast of different colours although within the limitations of marble, because marble is made from the ground, so it’s no surprise that it’s brown!

And are you interested in the contrast between its current state (very run down and mainly used as a toilet!) and that very precious material that you’ll be using?

It is such a toilet and there’s piss all over the place but I thought the best thing to do would be to try and make it really beautiful. Also marble is piss-proof, you know? You can hose it down or whatever.

I think the fact that it’s mainly used as a toilet is because those people don’t have anywhere to live and it is a covered staircase. So it would be nice if those people could have somewhere to live. I don’t think they should be moved out, they should be given somewhere so they don’t have to sleep there or shit there.

Or to look at it another way, if that staircase is a toilet, when I go to the toilet I like a nice toilet and marble is also traditional toilet material. So those guys should just have a really nice toilet, you know?

Martin Creed Down Over Up is on at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh until 31 October 2010. 

Work No. 1020: Ballet is showing at the Traverse Theatre 8 – 15 August 2010.

Martin Creed will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 16 August.