V ince Aletti is a writer and curator known for his photographic criticism in The Village Voice and The New Yorker. He also houses a collection of over 10,000 magazines in his New York apartment, which we toured on a hot summer afternoon, taking in his sprawling library as we slipped past the myriad stacks. Aletti encouraged us not only to look but also to touch any object we might be interested in. If not for his openness, it might have felt illicit to enter a collector’s home. Aletti invited us to participate in, rather than view from a distance, his universe of things. The refusal to store objects out of sight speaks to a radical ethic of presence: objects must be seen, handled and read.
It’s a visceral experience, walking through this world full of richness; one can imagine never needing anything aside from what is already there, at a hand’s reach. It spurred us to think through certain questions: What inspired this intense focus in his collecting practice? What is the psychology behind living with versus storing one’s collection? What distinguishes a collection from an archive?
The act of collecting is often solitary and obsessive, yet Aletti has created a personal trove that is also a social object—inviting viewers to enter his space, engage in dialogue, share in a mutual curiosity. Though Aletti has cohabitated with his continually growing piles for nearly half a century, his collection continues to surprise even him.
Unlike much of fine art, magazines are mass-produced, ephemeral and time-bound; they function both as a reproductive form and an original site of production. As a magazine collector, Aletti is clearly driven by content, context and historical texture rather than obtaining rarity or market value. From the start, Aletti felt buying magazines—fashion magazines in particular—served as a democratized form of art acquisition: in his words, “a way of picking a collection that I couldn’t afford otherwise.” Purchasing the September 1955 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, for example, not only entailed owning a copy of Richard Avedon’s “Dovima with Elephants,” but seeing the remaining images from that shoot, obtaining a fuller sense of its photographic and social context. “For someone as obsessive as I am,” Aletti told us, “I really like to see everything that went into and supported that picture that we know.” Collecting images in this way is an act of rescue, an effort to preserve what was intended to be forgotten or discarded.
When we asked Aletti about his motivations for amassing such a vast collection of periodicals, he laughed, then explained with a cheeky smile, “It’s one of those things that I think I need to see a psychiatrist for… I haven’t really thought it through. It clearly means a lot to me, and it’s all here.” That left us with the task of speculating. We learned that Aletti’s father, an amateur photographer, died in a plane crash when Aletti was a tender 10-year-old. Aletti’s mother quickly uprooted the kids from Pennsylvania to Florida, where Aletti was suddenly free; he took to reading and doing as he pleased, with little supervision. When we suggested if there could be a connection between his self-proclaimed obsession with photography and his early memories in the dark room with his father, Aletti at first vehemently disagreed, adding that he “deliberately erased” his father from memory for years. “Who knows why, but I just closed all that down, it seemed like the easiest thing to do,” he continued. Instead, he focused on his mother: “I felt it was [her] loss,” he recalled. “She was really bereft.”
“It’s a visceral experience, walking through this world full of richness; one can imagine never needing anything aside from what is already there, at a hand’s reach.”
Later in life, however, Aletti became close with the photographer Peter Hujar, who lived across the street, and with that friendship started mending the disavowal of his father’s importance in his psyche. “It was really interesting to spend time with him,” he said. “It wasn’t like it all came back to me, but on some level it was there. It was such a pleasure to smell those smells again, recall all of the steps involved. It really took me a long time to make that connection because of how far down I had sort of repressed it all. But now I’m glad to think about my father’s connection to photography.” Aletti’s collection resembles a melancholic structure: an ongoing negotiation with loss, time and cultural forgetting.
By the end of our conversation, Aletti revealed that it was clear to him that his collection serves as psychological scaffolding. The presence of the various materials in his apartment stabilize memory, reject grief and offer comfort, anchoring and stabilizing the self in place. Aletti’s collection serves as a holding environment, a form of somatic assurance that supports not only his work but also his life.
