Vince Aletti: Writing

Vince Aletti, formerly a rock critic at Rolling Stone and a columnist for Creem, Crawdaddy, Fusion and Record World (the last as a weekly chronicler of the rise of disco from 1974 to 1978), has been the photography critic for the Village Voice since 1987 and was the paper's art editor from 1994 to 2005.

Aletti is a regular columnist for Modern Painters (London) and Photograph, a contributor to Aperture, Art Review, and Artforum, and one of the two featured writers of The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (2001). This year, Aletti has written moving tributes to Helen Gee and Richard Avedon for the Village Voice, in addition to his weekly reviews of New York museum and gallery exhibitions. Aletti is especially attuned to new developments in the New York City art world and his writing combines a journalistic sensibility and an understated critical grammar.

In 1998, Aletti was the curator of a highly praised survey exhibition of art and photography called Male, which was followed up in 1999 by Female, both at Wessel + O'Connor Gallery in New York. In conjunction with those shows, he was the co-editor of the Fall 1999 "Male/Female" issue of Aperture, featuring his interview with Madonna, which was later anthologized in Da Capo's Best Music Writing (2000). In 2000, he was the co-curator of an exhibition called Settings & Players: Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography at London's White Cube 2 gallery, and the following year he organized a show of Steven Klein's fashion work for the Museé de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is working on Male, a book of photographs from his collection, to be published by Scalo/D.A.P. He lives in New York City.