A Visit to the International Center of Photography in New York

Consistent quality, great scholarship, thriving students, and a new home in the Bowery

W hen I was in London I visited the Photographers’ Gallery, London’s pioneer space for the study and enjoyment of photography. It’s celebrating its 50th birthday, having opened in the days when most critics, curators, and art historians considered photography low-end art, if they thought of it as art at all. “All you have to do is click,” snoots believed. What they really hate is the camera’s threat to elitism. Most anyone can use it. Anyone and anything is, potentially, a subject. Praise the Lord, I’m not a snob, a snoot, or a clodhopper posing as a connoisseur.

In writing my story on the gallery and its nice retrospective of Helen Levitt’s career, I promised myself a visit to the International Center of Photography in New York. I hadn’t seen its new building on Essex Street in the Bowery. It opened right before the Covid calamity. I went to school with David Little, the new director. School chums notwithstanding, I’ve always liked the place. As artists go, photographers are scrappy, inquisitive, and entrepreneurial. They’re extroverts. As a place for scholarship, the ICP is cutting-edge good. They do smart shows that make a difference.

I spent most of my visit in the ICP’s exhibition galleries. Two new shows — A Trillion Sunsets and Actual Size! — are there. First, though, I focused on the building. It’s nice. More than nice since it’s functional, practical, and economically efficient. The ICP, founded in 1974, is new, so moving isn’t unnatural. Last time I visited, it was leasing a prime but pricey space on Sixth Avenue across from Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. It had a home or two before that.

Gensler designed the new, $60 million building. The façade is a concise, rectangular glass box with a pierced metal screen. It’s attractive as well as simple. The ICP is a flagship feature of a big reimagining of this part of the Lower East Side. Nearly $2 billion in new development is bringing homes, offices, shops, and parks to a ratty part of the city.

The first floor — a single space running block-to-block — is home for the front desk, café, and bookshop. It’s welcoming and buzzing, as it should be. The ICP is an art gallery but also a school. It feels like a school in that the entire first floor looks like creativity is happening, with students, books, coffee, art on the walls, and fresh-faced staff aplenty. The second and third floors are mostly exhibition space. The third-floor gallery space opens to view the second floor, so it’s spacious. There’s one gallery on the second floor that’s two stories tall. I love these galleries.

I visited the school’s library, classrooms, equipment room, and darkroom, all in a well-organized, to-the-point wing that operates as a partner and equal to the art space. There are no spatial hierarchies. My sense is that everyone feels that the school and the art program are now integrated and reinforcing. This is very nice and very rare. For a while, the school had its own campus downtown, separate from the museum. This is far from ideal. It siloes and generates competition and grievance. The new campus is 40,000 square feet.

Over the years I’ve done two exhibitions with ICP and, blinkered me, I didn’t know it had a school. And an impressively dynamic one. It serves young students training to excel in photography but also experienced photographers who want to solve a problem. Photography, as media in art go, is rooted in equipment. Artists might have a vision for a photography project but have technical mysteries to solve. The school serves them, too.

About 3,000 students are there each year, coming and going full-time or part-time, in certificate programs, tutorials, or independent studies. There are eight classes in documentary and journalism photography. Impromptu portraiture, approaching strangers, and visual storytelling are offered in short courses that all look tempting. There’s a 20,000-volume library in the building.

I felt lots of energy and purpose there. I’ve spent most of my life in schools. This one is arranged logically and practically. The faculty are mostly working photographers. The place is about serious education, no silly frills or tangents allowed.

I enjoyed Actual Size! It’s a clever exhibition of photographs as big as their subjects, easy to make if the subject’s a still life of flowers or a bust portrait but a challenge when it’s, say, a bus. It’s in a space that’s two stories high. It celebrates the new building’s versatility.

Tanya Marcuse’s Woven No. 30, at 62 by 160 feet, is a forest floor but looks hallucinatory. It’s woven in the sense that life, death, decay, and rebirth unfold as an organism, but “woven” also in looking like an Old Master tapestry. It’s from 2018. I love her work. I saw an exhibition of hers at Julie Saul’s gallery a few years ago about fruit trees in late fall when they’re leafless and fruitless. It was a feast of lines.

Jeff Wall’s Approach, from 2014, is a life-size black-and-white photograph of a woman draped in a blanket living in a cardboard hut under a freeway in Los Angeles. It’s got the look of an Old Master, too, in its precise, balanced composition and suggestive but not club-you-over-the-head narrative. It’s documentary, too. Its scale gives us a you-are-there feel. It’s universal, too. It could be anywhere.

“Life size” doesn’t always mean as big as I am, and I’m tall. Muhammad Ali’s hands, and they’re big, and Pele’s thighs were photographed for Esquire in 1974 and 1975. And then there’s Mason Williams’s 1967 life-size photograph of a 36-foot-long Greyhound bus. It’s an edition of 150 made from separate prints of photographed bus parts folded and placed in a box with a note reading “Do Not Open in the Wind.”

It’s a good exhibition, though it’s missing the technology piece. Large-scale photography exists because of new equipment and processing. “How was this made” is a question visitors ask of Woven No. 30, at 14 feet wide, or Paola Pivi’s aerial photograph of a Sicilian island from 2001. We see, I think, a cross-section of images since a complete photograph would be 1,640 by 5,979 feet. She’s an artist committed to improbable things. Years ago, the Golden Lion–award-winning Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale featured her work. Photographs like this or her image of zebras in the Arctic or a leopard walking a gallery floor amid hundreds of coffee cups provoke big question marks, big enough to require curatorial answers.

Actual Size! and A Trillion Sunsets both explore topics that are intriguing and ubiquitous. We live in an age of gigantism in art but also in hyperbole, so “how big can it get” is an obvious yet compelling question, as is “aren’t we saturated to death with images?” A Trillion Sunsets tells us in the beginning of the exhibition that Flickr users uploaded 350 million images daily, and that was in 2013. “Basta,” I sputtered. But what exactly does “too many images” do? Does it deaden us to feeling or destroy discernment?

First of all, these concerns predate Flickr, Facebook, and Google. An apt wall quote from Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 photography survey posits the problem. “In the hands of the ruling society, illustrated magazines are one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding,” he wrote. “The blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference to what things mean.” Image overdoses destroy memory, and from memory comes wisdom. Harry Callahan’s Collages, from 1957, is made from clippings of what looks like hundreds of images from magazines, almost all fragments of women’s faces, though here and there is a high heel or a handbag. It’s intense.

I’m not sure Kracauer’s assessment is completely correct. A Trillion Sunsets is about image overload, and that’s a good subject. I’d like to learn more about how the eye and the mind edit, since edit we do. People in cities, for instance, see things in fragments. That’s nothing new. I think there’s indeed a “strike against understanding,” but this is a failure in critical thinking and basic education, leading to a triumph of gullibility. These have nothing to do with a surfeit of visuals.

Some of the art works, some doesn’t. Jess Dugan’s Letter to My Father, from 2017, is a video in which snapshots of her and her father flash across the screen as she narrates grudges and grievances, all justified, surrounding her father’s indifference to her as a child, young woman, and lesbian. What can I say? Her father’s a jerk. That doesn’t make good art, though. And is it a deluge of images? No, her family photographs unroll slowly, certainly slower than in a contemporary American film, where clips move like machine-gun fire.

Collages by Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Walker Evans from the 1930s don’t work since we don’t feel bombarded or overwhelmed. Evans’s Penny Picture Display, from 1936, is a collage of 210 passport-style headshots. Yes, it tells us the photographed image is everywhere in modern life, but that’s not a profound point. I liked it for its encyclopedia of head shapes, hairstyles, eyes, and single, double, and triple chins. Richard Prince and Louise Lawler are in the show, too. Their rephotographed photographs are the most boring things in the history of boredom.

Who wouldn’t love Frank Film, by Frank Mouris? It’s a 1974 nine-minute short showing 11,000 images he thinks characterized his childhood and young adulthood but also images that, as he said, “look nice to me.” It’s wonderful and makes the exhibition. TV, pets, food, Catholic school, crushes, working at his father’s gas station, clothes, dance lessons, and career aspirations leading to filmmaking get split seconds via images and his double narration. I wouldn’t call it Pop Art, since there’s no irony, and there’s no cool detachment. It’s the life and times of a Baby Boomer on steroids, and he doesn’t hate his parents, capitalism, or the country. For all the thousands of images flashing at the viewer, Frank Film is an autobiography. It’s about one unique person.

I enjoyed both exhibitions. They look good, and I had the chance to admire versatile and spacious new galleries. Even in moving to a new home, ICP still has a knack for exhibitions that use art we know, but about which we haven’t thought much, to explore meaty topics in an intelligent way. I worked on an ICP show about television and avant-garde art in the ’30s and ’40s and another on how images of African-American men in ’60s and ’70s magazines and TV expressed group masculinity. One show was esoteric while the other gave well-known images a context.

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These are ICP brands, but a balanced, various program is also its calling card. I’ve seen great shows surveying careers of artists such as Weegee and Lewis Hine and shows about a parlous point in time like 9/11, the day of the Kennedy assassination, and 1944 France.

The place has a mission to collect, display, and interpret what it calls “concerned photography,” defined as “socially and politically minded images that can educate and change the world.” A very 1974 goal, but it’s not a bad one. We’re social and political creatures, and I would add economic ones, too, and we’re all looking to make a difference. The ICP doesn’t club its visitors with cant. The art’s almost always both profound and good.

Photography collections live in storage because of light sensitivity but also, in the case of ICP, because the collection is so big. It’s got 200,000 objects, not covering the history of photography but with depth in artists such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, and Lisette Model, and in groups like vernacular photography, views of New York, and FSA photography. The collection helps generate ideas for exhibitions and is there for students, too.

With a new director and new building, as well as good donors, financial stability, and solid traditions, the ICP is in a good place. I’m looking forward to my next visit and many more.

And as a treat, here’s “Frank Film.”  It won the Academy Award for best short subject in 1974.