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While its neighbors on club row set up velvet ropes and polish the dance floors, the Aperture Foundation focuses on loftier pursuits: hosting free lectures and panel discussions that “advance photography in all its forms.” On the fourth floor of a building filled with galleries, the organization has a rich history to live up to never mind the tenants it competes with. Co-founded as a quarterly magazine by Ansel Adams in 1952, the foundation now has both an airy, whitewashed main space for its exhibitions, and a second room for selling limited-edition prints and portfolios by the likes of Dorothea Lange and Jock Sturges. (In its role as a book publisher, Aperture printed Sturges’s volume of prepubescent nudes, Last Day of Summer, soon after the FBI raided his studio.) Some of this revenue goes to assist young shutterbugs who receive six months' training in all of the foundation’s endeavors. A white swinging door in the gallery hides the organizational headquarters, where Aperture the mag is still produced. — Caroline Kinneberg

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