Aperture was made in response to selected work from the renowned photography collection at the Akron Art Museum. The project premiered in 2019 and was supported through the Knight Arts Challenge Award. I chose 5 photographer/artists whose creative ideas and processes could not be more different - Sophie Calle, Carrie Mae Weems, Esther Bubley, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Adam Fuss. I was attracted to each artist's distinctive vision of what it means to be fully alive in oneself and to the world around us. The moments in time they have captured allow us to connect to other places, people, their history, and experiences into ways that remind us how we understand our identity and the process of becoming who we are. -David Shimotakahara