The
International Center of Photography is back, and welcome. Two years
after losing its Midtown Manhattan quarters, the center has reopened on
the Bowery, across from the New Museum. The duplex galleries, on street
and basement levels, are, technically, larger than the old ones, though
they feel boxy and closed-in, at least for the opening show, “Public, Private, Secret.” As if to offset this impression, the show gives evidence that the center’s view of photography itself has expanded.
In
its 2014 Triennial, the center made a serious move toward embracing
digital media, and now it has fully done so. Photography no longer means
pictures printed and framed. It also means images, infinite in number,
flowing in real-time data streams and captured on webcams, video blogs,
Twitter and Instagram. This institutional shift in emphasis from hard
objects to the broad field of visual culture will make old-style
connoisseurs crazy, but it is in line with the center’s history.
It
was founded in 1974 largely as a showcase for street photography, war
photography and other socially committed and essentially journalistic
genres: Content was as important as form. The inclusion of digital media
maintains that interest, with the internet now functioning as both
boulevard and battlefield, and — this really is new — where
photographers were once a distinctive and specialized crew, now almost
everyone is armed, for better and worse, with picture-taking devices and
the means to distribute images.
The
defining of better and worse forms the basis for a stimulating and
unsettling exhibition. Its digital orientation is established right at
the start with a projected video based on borrowings from social media.
The piece, by Natalie Bookchin, is
divided into thematic sections, each a visual patchwork of talking
heads, mostly of young, English-speaking men and women gathered from
online video diaries. In one sequence, all the heads speak of their
experience with psychiatric medications, in another with losing jobs.
Ms.
Bookchin’s editing is inventive and revealing. Every time a word or
phrase common to all the diaries occurs, all the heads say it in unison,
interrupting film’s otherwise random-seeming
this-speaker-then-that-speaker flow. The overall effect is twofold: You
get a sense of the existence of a digitally connected community of
suffering, one with a shared vocabulary and set of emotions. You also
begin to wonder, as you do when you overhear public cellphone
conversations: How is it possible that so many people are living such
clichéd lives?
The raw material for a 2012 video by Doug Rickard
is also digital, but of a different kind: found images of American
crime scenes and police actions uploaded from cellphones and posted on
YouTube. Mr. Rickard collages excerpts from various postings into
fictional narratives, notable less for their plotlines than for the
atmosphere of danger they project. That atmosphere is similar to one
generated by news media and the film industry, an adrenalin-fueled mood
of fear, suspicion and emergency, encouraging violence.
In
one way or another, much of the show — assembled by Charlotte Cotton,
the center’s first curator in residence, working with Pauline Vermare,
associate curator, and Marina Chao, assistant curator — is built around
the basic elements of Mr. Rickard’s work: surveillance crossing into
voyeurism, visual fiction standing in for truth. But then, hasn’t
photography always had a predatory streak, an eye for existential dirt,
an impulse to lie if that will grab attention? Sure, and there are
plenty of predigital demonstrations of that here.
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Among
them are old French and Mexican mug shots of criminal suspects, and a
1942 shot by the Bowery habitué Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, of two
drunk-and-disorderly swells cowering behind face-hiding hats in a paddy
wagon. Far more complicated are four mug-shot-style portraits of Berber
or Muslim women taken in 1960 by Marc Garanger
in Algeria, when he was working for the French Army. The women,
confined to a concentration camp, were forced to unveil for the sittings
and stare at the camera with undisguised, level-eyed fury.
These
are images of violation. There are others, several associated with
celebrity culture. In a 1971 photograph we see Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis dashing across a lawn in Central Park, apparently fleeing the
photographer, Ron Galella, who had been stalking her for years. Two
internet-savvy contemporary artists, Ann Hirsch and Marisa Olson, turn
the humiliation of losing highly visible competitions — a reality dating
show, an “American Idol” audition — into triumphs of self-engineered
failure. And in a flawless win-win power move, the media star Kim
Kardashian assumes the role of auto-stalker, publishing a book
consisting entirely of her own selfies.
I
can’t speak for Ms. Kardashian, but many of the show’s younger
participants are clearly well aware that they, and we, are being
observed, photographed, biometrically tracked and profiled whether we
want to be or not, and that this is a problem. And at least one artist, Zach Blas,
is doing something about it. He has designed a blobby pink plastic mask
to thwart facial recognition scanning, a technology with the potential,
possibly already realized, of using racial and sexual stereotyping to
isolate groups of social undesirables.
Racial
stereotyping has, of course, a long history and artists have tried all
kinds of ways to deal with it. A decade or so ago, the intriguing
Chicago-based photographer and filmmaker Barbara DeGenevieve (1947-2014)
hired five homeless men, all African-American, to pose nude for her in a
hotel room. When she exhibited the results as “The Panhandler Project,”
she took serious critical heat, with many viewers calling the work
exploitive. Some will still find it so, though as the mechanics of
American economic privilege grow starker, her attempt to confuse roles
usually dictated by ethnicity, class and gender looks more and more
useful.
Ms.
Cotton includes only a single photograph from Ms. DeGenevieve’s
project, and it’s hard to get much from that. But another meditation on
race, and specifically on blackness, Martine Syms’s
video installation “Lessons I-LXVIII,” is the show’s most substantial
piece in terms of length. It’s composed in 10-minute units, each made up
of randomly sorted 30-second clips related to African-American life,
lifted from online videos and visual blogs, including home movies, video
diaries, police webcams and advertisements. Many of the fragments are
hard to grasp on their own, but together they turn the black presence,
still marginalized in mainstream American art and culture, into
something substantial, integral and self-sustaining, a whole and
sufficient cloth.
Ms.
Syms’s ambitious work, dated 2014-16, brings us again into the digital
realm, which can be uneven ground to visit. A set of flat screens
streaming real-time data from Twitter and other social media sources
keeps the show in the 24/7 now, where it should be. And the information,
organized by Mark Ghuneim, an internet entrepreneur, and students from
the center’s New Media Narratives program and sometimes presented in the
form of online addresses, gives a good sense of the pervasive influence
of digital technology on daily life, whether in police surveillance or
assignment of pop star status. At the same time, the piece offers few
visual rewards, and demands smartphone finger work to access its
information.
And
if Ms. Bookchin’s conglomerate snapshot of a video diary culture hints
at a condition of passive narcissism as the dominant malady of life
inside the digital bubble, Jon Rafman’s short, composite 2014 video “Mainsqueeze”
is infinitely more damning. Its seven-minute sequence of found Google
Street View images drops you into a deep pit of physical and
psychological cruelty, and cracks the door on a dark side of the social
media age that this exhibition otherwise barely hints at. No wonder
21st-century karma is in such horrendous shape.
The
visual content of this piece is a far cry from the museum quality
images usually associated with the center as a collecting institution.
And the exhibition itself, with its mirrored walls and jumble of unalike
works, has a looseness that most museums, intent on writing clear
narratives, would clean up. At this point, though, visual culture —
digital production, including photography — is so abundant and changing
so fast that no clear narrative is possible. Photography fans hoping
that the return of the center will mean a return of its vintage
collection may have to wait awhile. This institution, so often ahead of
the curve, has other, challenging ideas on its mind, and the less it
acts like a museum the better.
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Reinventing the International Center of Photography for the Selfie Age
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