Vince Aletti


Vince Aletti is a curator, writer, and photography critic.

Career

Music industry

Aletti was a contributing writer for Rolling Stone from 1970 to 1989. He was the first person to write about disco in an article published by the magazine in 1973. He also wrote a weekly column about disco for the music trade magazine Record World, and reported about early clubs like David Mancuso's The Loft for The Village Voice in the late 1970s and 1980s. Aletti was a senior editor at The Village Voice for nearly 20 years until leaving in early 2005.
Aletti worked with New York deejay Ritchie Rivera to curate a double-album disco compilation for Polydor Records, which released it in 1978 as Steppin' Out: Disco's Greatest Hits. Music critic Robert Christgau found it superior to Casablanca Records' Get Down and Boogie and Marlin's Disco Party, writing in : "Although local talent is represented, I find the spacey, lush-but-cool Euro-disco that predominates even more enticing, no doubt because the filler in which such music is usually swamped has been eliminated. New discoveries include the Chakachas' legendary 'Jungle Fever' and 'Running Away' by Roy Ayers, ordinarily the emptiest of 'jazz' pianists. This is disco the way it should be heard—as pure dance music, complete with risky changes."
In 1979 and 1980, Aletti also worked as the A&R Rep for Ray Caviano’s RFC Records.

Photography

Aletti is best known for his contributions to fine art photography. He reviewed photography exhibitions for The New Yorker until 2016.
Aletti has also curated numerous photography exhibitions, and has contributed writing for dozens of photography books. In 1998, Aletti was the curator of a highly praised 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 the book "Male/Female: 105 photographs" published by Aperture in 1999, featuring his interview with Madonna, which was later anthologized in Da Capo's Best Music Writing.
In 2000, he was the co-curator of an exhibition called Settings & Players: Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography at London's White Cube. The following year Aletti organized Steven Klein American Beauty a retrospective exhibition of Steven Klein's fashion work for the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Aletti was one of the two featured writers of The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century''.
In 2005, Aletti was the recipient of the Infinity Award for writing by The International Center for Photography.

Exhibitions curated by Aletti