2005 Infinity Award: Writing

Vince Aletti, formerly a rock critic at Rolling Stone and a columnist for Creem, Crawdaddy, Fusion, and Record World, 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). He is especially attuned to new developments in the New York 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" that 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.