Forty ways of looking at a stranger: in its first Triennial exhibition, the International Center of Photography brought together work by 40 photographers, all of it dealing in some fashion with what it means to be a stranger - Photography

The international Center of Photography's decision to organize its first Triennial of Photography and Video around the theme "Strangers" was a small stroke of genius--or at least the photographs and videos included made it seem so. Disparate but consistently intelligent and engrossing, the work shared a take home message that being a stranger--as opposed to, say, an Other--is an everyday, lowercase thing, remarkable mainly for the commomness of the experience. And also, of course, for its strangeness. ICP senior curator Christopher Phillips, one of the Triennial's four organizers, says the theme was arrived at in the summer of 2001, when they" "realized a common thread was artists engaging with persons unknown to them." Holding onto this thread, he says, allowed the curators to examine the boundaries of personal comfort in the world today. Soon, circumstances over took them. A wall text explains that 'after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, "the issue of fear and trust among people in public space seemed unavoidable." Sometimes, as Phillips points out, what artists do is uncannily anticipatory.

The wall text also mentioned a "recognition of the recent revival of urban street photography." Co organizer Carol Squiers notes the ICP's original focus on documentary photography and photojournalism, and says that the Triennial curatorial team, which also included Edward Earle and the center's chief curator, Brian Wallis, wanted to examine the influence of that tradition on current art practice. Squiers adheres to a clear distinction between photojournalism and art--they involve "different preoccupations and different freedoms," she contends--and says the team's attention was drawn to journalistic street photography's art outcome. Describing the exhibition this way is a little deceptive: it was not a showcase for latter-day Cartier-Bressons or Robert Franks, and indeed there was a smattering of subjects that are wholly or partly fictional. But the exhibition did maintain an emphasis on anonymous citizens of the real world.

In doing so, it neatly sidestepped many of the photographers now best known to the art public, from Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth to Cindy Sherman and Mariko Mori. It may come as a surprise that by eliminating family and friends (away go Tina Barney, Nan Goldin) and, most resolutely, self portraiture, huge chunks of the reputedly mass-media-attuned photo-image world fall away.

Also downplayed in this inaugural Triennial were those woozy images of sultry teenage girls that in recent years have been nearly ubiquitous. Nor did the curators find much use for recently favored technical mannerisms: there was very little blurring or dimming or other forms of visual impoverishment, and digital morphing and erasure were generally avoided. Indeed, there was almost nothing on the fallibility of photography, which is, after all, a farm of (medium-specific) self-regard. And though all these omissions defined the exhibition's subject in negative terms, they also constituted a very refreshing reprieve.

That is not to say that there were no familiar names among the 40 photographers chosen, who together represent 20 countries. For instance, Rineke Dijkstra (the Netherlands), well-known balladeer of teenage angst, was represented by a suite of photographs that glimpse, at two-year intervals, a newly emigrated Bosnian girl named Almerisa becoming a full-grown Dutch woman. Complicating ground rules established in familiar projects by Nicholas Nixon and Michael Apted (among others), Dijkstra shows Almerisa becoming an adult not just visibly less alienated from the photographer but also progressively more comfortable with her adopted homeland and (it seems) herself. Together, Dijsktra's Almerisa photographs neatly captured the exhibition's two main avenues of exploration, the one directed inward to a psychological experience of estrangement, the other outward toward a social condition.

The equally well-exposed Justine Kurland (U.S.) broke away Acre from the bad-girl picture pack in a serial documentation of rural communes. With this series she traces the figure of the "stranger," generally treated in the Triennial as all urbanite and even as a defining character of urbanism, back to the American heartland. These communes' self-affiliated families of men and women, oldsters and babies, are absurdly, touchingly mismatched; often co-residents don't even seem to bc sharing a season (as when some subjects are naked, while others in the same photo wear clothing suitable for deepest winter, or, better, a masked ball). But Kurland's images, modestly scaled and precisely detailed, treat all with equal dignity. Assuming rather formal attitudes, the communards for the most part seem tough as nails, and often far gone in forlornness, though a few are assembled with an eye toward mythic narrative. The Fall, for instance, seems to cite a Renaissance Expulsion--Masaccio's, in particular--with its naked man and woman, small and frail in the arid, brambly landscape, walking humbly away.