Two years ago, the International Center of Photography
bowed to the realities of Manhattan real estate, giving up its Midtown
home on Avenue of the Americas and going dark. Now it is set to reopen
on June 23 in a new incarnation downtown, after institutional
introspection compelled not only by the move but also by the presiding
quandary about what, exactly, defines photography today as the medium
keeps morphing and mutating within a vast, evolving technological
landscape. The smartphone has turned us all into photographers; social
media floods us with an endless array of images; omnipresent video
threatens the relevance of the still photograph; and the hovering eye of
drone surveillance chronicles our every move. The center had to
recalibrate.
Its
curatorial staff has been investigating the meaning and relevance of
photography for years with shows that, at times, either challenged the
medium, confirmed the stature of individual photographers or identified
significant new work. In 2014, the center’s controversial exhibition “What Is a Photograph?”
didn’t try to answer the question, said Carol Squiers, the show’s
curator, but simply posed it. It was the right question at the right
time, underscoring the challenge ahead for the institution as it
searched for a new home.
The
center paid $23.5 million for 11,000 square feet of exhibition space at
250 Bowery, across from the New Museum on the Lower East Side and only
blocks from the cluster of anti-Chelsea galleries and restaurants that
cater to a millennial crowd. An all-glass, street-level facade is
intended to draw foot traffic into a visible public space where talks
and events are planned.
With
its new neighborhood comes an expanded identity. Mark Lubell, the
executive director, now refers to the center as an institution dedicated
to “photography and visual culture,” a term meant to incorporate the
breadth of the technological change in which photography is a malleable
part. Mr. Lubell insists that we are no longer even photographers, per
se, but, rather, “image makers.”
In
the context of such multitentacled image-making — 350 million pictures
are uploaded daily on Facebook alone — the center’s curators must make
sense of the vast array of imagery presented on myriad platforms and to
identify work that most poignantly reflects contemporary experience and
warrants historical preservation.
“I
look at I.C.P. as an arbiter in this wild, wild west world that we’re
living in right now,” Mr. Lubell said in an interview earlier this
spring, gesturing to an illustration of the center’s new facade on
display in his office, which is still in Midtown. In a world where
everyone is taking pictures of everything, he said, “there should be a
place with a deep history of the understanding of photography and the
power of the image in order to put some of what’s happening today in
context.”
The
issue was simpler for Cornell Capa, the Magnum photographer who founded
the center in 1974 in an elegant neo-Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue
at 94th Street, with galleries in intimate parlors. The impetus to open
it derived from Mr. Capa’s growing anxiety in the late 1960s about the
diminishing relevance of photojournalism because of the increasing use
of film footage on television news. It would be a center for “concerned
photography” — the term he coined for social-documentary photography in
which, he specified, “genuine human feeling predominates over commercial
cynicism or disinterested formalism.”
The
center opened just as photography was gaining stature in the art world,
yet it proceeded on a course parallel to the museum world — one in
which subject matter took precedence over artistic intent. Its first
show was the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, an appropriate choice given
Mr. Capa’s relationship to Magnum — his brother, Robert, was a
co-founder, along with Cartier-Bresson. All three were exemplars of
bedrock photojournalism.
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Willis
E. Hartshorn, Mr. Lubell’s predecessor, was executive director from
1994 to 2012, and sharpened the center’s goals. Upon his retirement, Mr.
Hartshorn said he had aimed for “greater awareness about how pictures
create meaning and an understanding of the impact that they have on us.
You know, visual literacy.” To that end, in the last decade the center’s
curatorial program stood at the front of the art world’s dialogue about
photography. “A Different Kind of Order,”
its fourth Triennial, in 2013, featured a roster of contemporary
artists, including Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen and Walid Raad, who have
a substantial influence on the making of photographic art today.
The
question now is whether it can keep a clear eye on what the medium is
becoming without losing sight of its history. The exhibition
inaugurating the new Bowery space, “Public, Private, Secret,” is organized by Charlotte Cotton,
the center’s first curator in residence. It explores the ways in which
self-identity is intertwined with public visibility. At the same time,
technology is yielding new breeds of photography, and artists are
exploiting the medium’s surveillance capabilities or identifying visual
patterns in social media networks.
Visitors
will confront their reflections in mirrored partitions meant to suggest
our “selfie culture”; Closed Circuit Television cameras will document
museumgoers with live feeds projected as pixelated patterns of color on a
wall in the public space. The idea here is to pay attention to the
visual language of machines, something we are all being conditioned to
read.
In
the main gallery, there will be video-based wall-size projections of
work by Natalie Bookchin, Jon Rafman and Doug Rickard, who “represent a
clear turn in artistic practice,” Ms. Cotton said, “choosing to gather
and sequence found images and footage from the vast terrain of social
media.” She said “authorship and artistry reside in the ways in which
they sequence and edit seemingly disparate and unconnected visual
material” to tell new kinds of stories about contemporary behavior.
Amid
construction debris as the galleries were being completed, Ms. Cotton
described the heightened sensory effect she hopes to achieve with the
installation. “I create shows for people who like to put things in their
mouth to see what they taste like,” she said with a wry smile,
describing her goal to create a visceral experience. In a separate
gallery, work will be shown by established artists who have long
explored issues of identity — Sophie Calle, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nan
Goldin, Martha Rosler and Larry Sultan, among others.
Asked
if the trustees are on board for this journey, Jeffrey A. Rosen, deputy
chairman of Lazard and president of the center’s board, projected
confidence. “I’m a strong believer,” he said in a telephone interview,
adding that the board does not get involved with programming. “The
director runs the institution,” he said.
Stefano
Tonchi, editor in chief of W Magazine, joined the board four years ago.
He doesn’t think that responding to photography’s digital evolution
alters the center’s fundamental purpose. On the contrary, “the art of
photography has really changed so much,” he said by phone. “I think
I.C.P. would really like to chronicle these changes and be in step with
the times.”
The
senior curators Christopher Phillips and Ms. Squiers are working on the
next show, “Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change,” planned
for January. “We’re trying to take apart the online visual world and
organize it in some way that is more comprehensible,” Ms. Squiers said.
The
show’s themes will include “ISIS and the Imagery of Terror.” Ms.
Squiers is looking at the organization’s intensive media campaign of
propaganda, designed both to lure recruits and to frighten other people.
“The very violent material that we see all the time in the American
press is only a small part of the visual material that ISIS puts out,”
Ms. Squiers said. “In fact, the greater part of its output is a kind of
utopian view of what the caliphate is doing for people now and will do
for them in the future.”
Another
theme of “Perpetual Revolution” will be the impact digital media have
had on extreme winter sports. Technology continues to alter our visual
experience and even shape our activities. The speed and agility with
which GoPro cameras, for example, document treacherous jumps on
500-pound snowmobiles has only increased the bravado of those athletes,
making them try ever more dangerous stunts. Ms. Squiers joked that the
images in this part of the show might “draw a new demographic of
14-year-old boys into I.C.P. for my little celebration of these sports.”
The
center is emphasizing the need to grasp the contemporary moment, but
what about the past as prologue? After all, photography evolved with
technological advances that changed the look of the image from one era
to another.
Asked
about the center’s formidable permanent collection, Mr. Lubell insisted
that it had not abandoned the history of photography and the masters of
the art. Still, no gallery space has been set aside at 250 Bowery to
show work from the collection, which is housed at Mana Contemporary,
an arts center in Jersey City. At least 85 percent of the 156,000
images in the collection are scanned, and students, scholars and general
visitors are able to access the pictures using onsite computers in
Jersey City.
“There’s
a millennial generation that doesn’t even know some of this great
work,” Mr. Lubell said. But some of those people will have to travel
across the river from the new center to see what photography once was.
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