The Drawer

The acclaimed curator’s scrapbook celebration of the beauty of photography and the printed page

American 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.