Next month, curator, writer, and photography critic Vince Aletti will receive the 2024 AIPAD Award, an accolade that celebrates visionaries who have been at the forefront of understanding and promoting photography. As part of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers’ presentation of the Photography Show, Aletti is being honored for his contributions to New York City’s cultural scene, which he began making in the 1970s.

“I do love art in general, but I only write about photography. I’ve been looking at it and thinking about it for most of my life,” Aletti recently told Vanity Fair. “My father was an amateur photographer, so I grew up with a darkroom in the attic. We had a lot of US Camera annuals that were these big compendiums of supposedly the best photos of the year, from very commercial to art photography. Those two things made an early impression on me: thinking about photography as a physical thing that you make by hand and as a job. It was never a question that it was an art form.”

Home is where the art is, one could say. Today, Aletti’s East Village apartment is filled with more than 10,000 neatly stacked books and magazines. Whether writing reviews, curating shows at the International Center of Photography, or editing art books featuring selections from his collection of fashion magazines, he turned his fascination with photography as a physical medium into a vocation after some two decades spent writing about music.

“I didn’t write about photography until I’d already been a rock critic for 20 years,” he said. “I wrote about music for many different magazines, including Rolling Stone and Creem. Little by little, I started reviewing photography exhibitions at The Village Voice, then became their main photography critic and their art editor at one point. After that, I transitioned to The New Yorker and continued to do weekly exhibition reviews.”

Before receiving the award at the Park Avenue Armory, Aletti spoke with Vanity Fair about his early days and influences, along with his next 30 years spent writing reviews of photography exhibitions and books.

Vanity Fair: In those first 20 years at Rolling Stone, were there any writers who were your guides along the way?

Vince Aletti: There were a number of key rock critics, including Richard Goldstein, Bob Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Jon Landau, who was my editor for a while. All of them were really, for me, formative writers and stylists of music criticism.

What about their style influenced your writing?

I thought it was really important, and I think it remains important, for critics to have an individual voice that your readers can trust or at least recognize. And even if they don’t agree with you, they know who you are—not only by expressing your opinion, but by the way you introduce yourself. The critics that I like have real personality, especially if you read them over a period of time. You come to understand where they’re coming from and can even anticipate what they’re going to like and not like. That’s crucial for someone who you’re gonna follow week after week. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do myself: to come across as a real person, not an expert—someone who has learned quite a bit about [photography] along the way and is writing about it from a personal point of view. I’m not trying to dictate; I’m trying to encourage people to go out and see the shows that are on and to think about them.

You’ve spoken before about your relationship with Peter Hujar. He was someone who taught you how to look at photographs and what it was like to be a working photographer. Are there other artists who have been touchstones for you?

There’s no one that I’m as close to as I was with Peter, or [who is] as influential on my way of looking. [We spent] time in the darkroom [together] occasionally, like I did with my father. So that was a very formative influence. It’s not like we talked about photography very much, but we looked at photo books and magazines together. I think that’s what I meant by, he taught me how to look at things. It was always interesting to me to see what he would zero in on that I might not have even noticed. That made me look a little deeper at everything I was looking at and think, What would Peter see in this? Since he’s died, it’s still something that I think about.

What does having that relationship with a photographer and seeing their day-to-day add to your understanding of the medium or your writing about it?

It makes me see things more clearly. To go back to the idea of the working photographer, that was incredibly influential for me. When I started writing about photography at the Voice, I wrote full-page profiles of photographers based on conversations with them. It was always in my mind that these people were just getting started. A lot of the people I spoke to were just having their first exhibition in New York. And I was curious how they made their lives. I think we’re all more and more understanding that art does not come out of some kind of exalted place—that it comes out of real hard work and not always easy work.

You’ve shared your incredible collection of magazines and printed matter through publications such as Issues (Phaidon, 2019) and The Drawer (SPBH, 2022). What’s in the stack of materials near you now?

[Laughs] I can’t even begin to answer that. I’m sitting in my living room surrounded by piles of four-by-five physique photographs that I mostly bought on eBay over the past four months. Piles of books and magazines that I have accumulated recently, or need to look at, to decide whether I want to review them. A lot of times, I buy magazines because I’m knocked out by the cover. They end up on the top of a pile briefly until they’re covered by something else. The fashion magazine collection alone is staggering, partly because I decided I needed to have every issue of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar from the 1930s to the present.

What about Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar made you want to be a completist?

That’s easy. I started buying a few fashion magazines because they either had a great [Irving] Penn or [Richard] Avedon cover. Then I realized that they had all this work by both of those photographers that never made it into any of their books. So I felt like I was buying all this material that I didn’t see anywhere else. Of course, I became interested in a lot of other photographers who were working alongside them: Saul Leiter, Lillian Bassman, Helmut Newton, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst. Basically, I just got hooked.

What are some of the most interesting changes that you’ve seen in fashion magazines?

Fashion magazines, especially, have an interesting history of pulling in work outside of fashion because the best of them are interested in the culture at large and in educating their audiences. I think the most interesting magazines continue to push the limit of what their readers are expecting—kind of challenging their reader without alienating them, but being okay with alienating a few of them. I think that’s what the best magazines and the best editors have done and continue to do, so that’s what keeps me interested. I think we’re in a very conservative period, especially with fashion. I hope that we swing back to something more adventurous.

I feel like someone like Collier Schorr is pushing things in a much more subtle way.

I agree. I just got her cover of Rolling Stone with Kristen Stewart on it, and I think that’s one of our best magazine and art pieces in a long time.

Do you ever worry about a water pipe bursting? Because I have a collection of books and magazines, and I worry about this all the time.

[Laughs] No, because I don’t see any water pipes in my apartment. I’m under the roof, so that is worrisome. But the times I’ve had leaks have been very minor and not affected anything. So not really. Of course, my nightmare is a fire, but let’s not even talk about that.