On view at the Harvard Art Museums from August 29 through May 9, 2027 is the exhibition "The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection," an examination of idealized visions of life in the United States from the postwar period through the Civil Rights era. Drawing on more than 20,000 images in the collection, which was assembled at Harvard in the mid-1970s by sociologist, lecturer, curator, and photographer Barbara Norfleet, the exhibition features the work of 20 professional photographers and studios, offering insight into dominant ideals of prosperity, domesticity, and conformity.

Aperture has always been a magazine first, a book publisher second, and only in recent decades a place with a bookstore and gallery space that people could walk into. During the pandemic lockdown, the doors to that space, in Chelsea, closed. Next month, those doors will reopen, at 380 Columbus Avenue, across from the American Museum of Natural History. The Upper West Side is an odd and interesting choice, if choice is even the word for a decision this momentous. Aperture has historically exis...