Is photography merely a recording apparatus, or is it an art? Does the camera record truthfully, or does it deceive? Only a few decades ago those were the questions that animated Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and the most serious thinkers about photographs and photographers. How dated they seem now. Photography has become something new – a ubiquitous thing, a duller thing, a thing we snap a hundred times a day on a device with a hundred other functions.
The International Center of Photography in New York, founded in 1974, was at the forefront of those earlier debates about the status of the camera arts. It now reopens in a new home on the Bowery – once a tumbledown street, now home to ever more galleries and shops – and with, it seems, a new orientation. The new ICP wants to look beyond art photography and photojournalism to drone visions, Snapchat effluvia, and all kinds of images made with a lens and light. If it does so thoughtfully, ICP could become a new sort of museum. But wow, does it have a way to go to get there.
ICP was first housed in a Fifth Avenue townhouse, where its founder, the Magnum photographer Cornell Capa, advocated for photojournalism with a humanistic bent. (His brother, Robert Capa, shot one of the best-known – and most disputed – war photographs of all time: a soldier fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish civil war, arms thrust back at he’s fatally shot.) Later, in 2001, the museum moved to Midtown, where it grew more engaged with photography as a fine art; ICP also opened a school, enrolling thousands of students a year.
The lease on the Midtown space ran out, and now ICP has taken up in a new home designed by the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, located on the ground floor and basement of a new condominium. At 11,000 sq feet, it is technically larger than the previous space, but careless design makes it seem unwelcoming. The ground-floor space, with a panoramic window onto the Bowery, is wasted on an oversized lobby and a twee café. Worse are the disciplinary basement galleries, harshly lit and hung with Ikea-style drop curtains, and in several cases saddled with low-slung drop ceilings. Disconcertingly, ICP has set aside no space at all for its substantial permanent collection of more than 150,000 photographs. They are housed, instead, in a facility across the river in New Jersey.
So the new building is a disappointment. But the first show is even more of one. Public, Private, Secret, organized by the curator Charlotte Cotton, purports to be a cross-disciplinary investigation of how we present ourselves through images. It yokes together artists and straight photographers, from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andy Warhol to Martha Rosler and Sophie Calle, with iffier contemporary offerings, plus mugshots, paparazzi snaps, and YouTube uploads. Many of the images are compelling, but the show itself is disagreeable and methodologically vacant, junking art history and putting nothing in its place.
Instead of thinking about images via juxtapositions and visual argument, the show merely aggregates. Art works and reproductions, considered imagery and throwaway snaps, are thrown together pell-mell. What few pairings are in evidence often feel shallow. One of Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills, in which the artist appears smoking in the bushes like a surprised ingénue, hangs next to a video of Kim Kardashian selfies. (The Sherman is not a vintage print, but a reprint from a decade after she created the work in 1979.) This is an exhibition that should have remained a Pinterest board.
There are some strong contributions from younger artists such as Jill Magid and Martine Syms, but also too many works that do little more than remind us that the internet is full of wacky videos and narcissists. Jon Rafman’s 2014 video Mainsqueeze is little more than a clip reel of fetishistic videos of the sort you’ll find on 4chan: a woman crushing a crayfish with her foot, or a guy in a frog costume and rope bondage. The video, along with three others, is projected in poor lighting conditions, and would have looked better on screens. Elsewhere the hang is careless to the point of hostility. Mirrored walls offer a jejune allusion to our selfie obsession. Laurel Nakadate’s well-worn photos of herself in tears are hung, strangely, at knee height. Compelling portraits of women during the Algerian war are misused when hung against a printed mural of unrelated mugshots.
Worst of all are custom screens, in the now obligatory square format of Instagram, that do nothing more than scrape social networks for recently posted images. I suppose, if you have never clicked a hashtag before, you may be surprised to discover that a lot of people take selfies or post pictures of other people. One screen has been programmed to feature images tagged #hotness; it hangs next to photos by Larry Clark of kids in flagrante. Another presents a stream of people who’ve gone missing, tagged “seeking this person” or “trying to identify”. One amalgamates the search terms “transgender” (I saw Caitlyn Jenner) with “plastic surgery” and “weight loss” – offensively implying that affirming one’s gender identity is nothing weightier than a makeover.
Social media imagery could have a place in the museum, if it formed part of a thoughtful argument. But these screens do nothing but affirm in the most literal way possible that we live in a world with lots and lots of images. It may be telling that this frivolity was conceived not by an artist or a photography curator, but by a corporate veteran named Mark Ghuneim whose branding startup was acquired by Twitter. (In a bizarre interview, Cotton exclaims: “I can’t think of another human being other than you that could have made this happen, Mark!” No other human being could have programmed a bot to scrape some hashtagged JPEGs?)
If ICP wants to turn its back on art history (and its own collection), and conceive of all images as equally valid elements of one giant image stream, that’s its prerogative. But then do something with that vision; don’t junk art history just to reproduce the web! The role of a 21st-century photography museum should be to analyze, synthesize, and historicize our understanding of today’s dispensation of images, rather than just to replicate the products of the search engine and the hashtag. A museum, this museum, must be so much more than an aggregator – more than a collection of JPEGs to be fleetingly contemplated before we swipe past.
• This article was amended on 28 June 2016 to clarify that Sikmore, Owings & Merrill designed the ICP space, but not the condominium building in which it is located.
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