It’s not just your cellphone that’s a camera now. Your doorbell can take photographs, and so might your car, your refrigerator and your toothbrush. Camera-sporting athletes now do the work of sports photojournalists, and all New York City beat cops wear a body camera. War photography has gone from a specialist’s art to a citizen’s daily action, and the stupid selfie you uploaded yesterday has already been scraped into a database and could be sold to law enforcement agencies or a private detective. This is the paradox: the average photograph has never been more banal or irrelevant, yet photography as a medium has never mattered more.
In 2020 we are in desperate, desperate need of a richer discourse about this new, pervasive era of photography: how the lens-based image became a ubiquitous thing, and how any image or photographer can gain distinction in this flood of pictures. Cross your fingers that the International Center of Photography finds its way there soon.
Since its founding by Cornell Capa (brother of Robert Capa, the photojournalist who shot the most notorious picture of the Spanish Civil War), ICP has stuck up for photography as both an art form and a historical record, but it has bumbled in the time of the social photo. What should a photography museum do when photographs are just about everywhere? ICP has to answer that in a new home at Essex Crossing, the large new Lower East Side development, though its initial programming suggests it’s still not sure.
ICP started out in a Museum Mile townhouse in 1974, where it focused on the documentary tradition Capa called “concerned photography,” and moved in 2000 to Midtown, where it placed equal attention on photography as a fine art. Its rent-free Midtown lease expired in 2015, just as the cameraphone began to swallow photography whole, and you could almost see ICP’s confusion about its approach to the medium reflected in its real-estate peregrinations. Its collection was displaced to Jersey City, its school stayed in Midtown and its museum drifted to a low-ceilinged home on the Bowery.
The Center’s new Essex Crossing residence, a 40,000-square-foot interior space designed by Gensler within a new condo building by SHoP Architects, is nothing flashy but no worse for that. There are two floors of galleries, some with full-height windows and some convertible into black boxes, plus an old-is-new-again Pentagram logo embedded in the tiles. (Proper ceiling heights, too!) There’s also a ground-floor cafe for those who haven’t gorged at the Market Line food hall across the street.
Other good news: ICP’s school will soon move to Essex Crossing, placing education and exhibition programs under one roof for the first time in two decades. But the new site is still not large enough to bring ICP’s collection of some 200,000 prints, including many signal photographs by American midcentury photojournalists, back from Jersey exile.
The inaugural shows do at least include one exhibition drawn from its permanent collection. “The Lower East Side” has 40 black-and-white prints shot in ICP’s new neighborhood, when immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe and China moved in and food came not from bistros but pushcarts. The Hungarian-born photographer Arnold Eagle, in his “One Third of a Nation” series, captures children in tenements and rabbis at the yeshiva. Seven photographs by the Danish-American reformer Jacob Riis expose filthy SROs and overcrowded schools, though the curators slime him in the wall texts as a labor-hating conservative whose pictures “often rob people of their humanity and dignity.”
The other three shows range from underwhelming to vacuous. Worst is “Warriors,” a techy rasp by the Seattle-based artist James Coupe, which uses facial-scanning software to insert gallerygoers’ faces into a 1970s B-movie. Billed as a “deepfake,” or nearly undetectable edit, the videos in fact exhibit glaring disjunctions: the inserted flesh judders right off the jaw, and the faces have overly rouged, Kewpie-doll cheeks.
More troubling than the janky tech is the muffed rationale; artists’ reconstructions of traditional cinema were old hat 20 years ago (think of Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe). This is tech for tech’s sake, and ICP should expect artists to examine life as shaped by new photographic technologies, rather than simply announce new technologies exist.
The largest show at the new ICP is “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop.” It was first seen at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, and is curated by the journalist Vikki Tobak, who previously put together a book and an Instagram account of the same name. Amid nearly 40 years’ worth of photographs of rappers and singers, the niftiest materials are the many contact sheets, including Michael Lavine’s outtakes for the cover of OutKast’s album “Stankonia,” and Eric Johnson’s shots of the rapper Eve strutting through New York in a floor-length robe.
Yet there’s a touch of Madame Tussauds in the approach of “Contact High,” which sets aside visual analysis for an undemanding showcase of your favorite celebrities. The principal wall texts do not name a single photographer, instead offering dubious platitudes like “Hip-hop portraiture is about pausing to see the subjects for who they truly are.” A whole wall is given to fresh inkjet prints of 1990s stars — Tupac and Jay, Missy and Mary. It will be easy to walk out of this show having ignored the actual achievements of photographers like Janette Beckman, Barron Claiborne and Al Pereira, whose talents are subordinated to Public Enemy, the Notorious B.I.G. and Queen Latifah.
ICP’s most interesting inaugural exhibition, though not without its own problems, presents the work of Tyler Mitchell, a 24-year-old American fashion photographer who rocketed to prominence two years ago, when he shot Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue. Many of the photographs here, which are almost exclusively of black models, have appeared in such hip magazines as Document and Zeit Magazin, though you can see them too on his Instagram account, amid selfies. Here he has printed some pictures on fabric and hung them on clotheslines (a motif he used in his Beyoncé shoot), which feels like a dubious effort to pump up the digital photograph for a gallery exhibition, as does the astral music pumped in.
In real space or digital, Mr. Mitchell has a solid eye and a skill for lighting that makes him a natural at editorial photography. His half-length portraits are especially beautiful. But he overindulges the easy absorption of social-justice language into the realms of fashion and style, and his video works feel elementary when compared to his stills.
Consider the three-screen installation “Chasing Pink, Found Red,” whose willowy young subjects in chinos lounge barefoot in the grass, while his many social media fans recount experiences of racism and issues of identity in voice-over. This sweet-and-sour, one-plus-one-makes-two approach might suffice for a fashion editorial, but art takes more, and you can wonder what ICP might have been had it given its first major show here to an artist with more experience and fewer Instagram followers.
For it is a wounding mistake to think that reaching a broader and younger audience requires a lowering of ambitions, and I can name one institution that used to know that. It was at the International Center of Photography, back in Midtown, that the artist Coco Fusco and the curator Brian Wallis presented “Only Skin Deep,” their sprawling 2003 exhibition on the role of the camera in the construction of American racial categories. It was at ICP that Okwui Enwezor, the towering Nigerian curator, first mounted “Rise and Fall of Apartheid,” an impassioned and typically precise study of South African photography and history from 2012, which mixed fine art, photojournalism and bureaucratic documentation.
Artists like Ms. Fusco and curators like Mr. Enwezor taught me, when I was as young as the children now flocking to Essex Crossing, that the photograph had both an aesthetic and a moral dimension. (And that the photograph of the black body, in particular, required all our intellectual efforts to account for a crushing historical lineage.) It wasn’t enough to glance. You had to think hard, read deeply, and look both at the surface of the image and the rhetoric that framed it.
That photographic dispensation has been wiped out in the age of Instagram, where knowledge has given way to “influence,” and the critical spirit has been ceded to microdoses of “affirmation.” Maybe, decrepit 30-something that I am, I’m showing my age. But I’d have thought there was no better venue for countering the shallowness of the screen — no better place to teach young audiences to look closely and think seriously — than a museum.
International Center of Photography
All inaugural shows run through May 18; 79 Essex Street, Manhattan; 212-857-9700, icp.org.