Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Sarah Caylor

ICP Triennial Strangers: "Presenting the works of forty contemporary artists from around the world, Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video explores the different roles that photography now plays in negotiating the boundaries between trust and fear, intimacy and isolation, and public and private life. This exhibition organized by the International Center of Photography in New York, Strangers investigates, as well, the social consequences of globalization through images emanating from encounters between people unknown to one another." (from the catalog)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video,"

International Center for Photography,

New York, New York,

September 13-October 30, 2003.

The unspoken premise of Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video is that photography remains an outsider, a "stranger" if you will, in the international art scene. Why else would we need an international survey of art photography in 2003? Of course, it also happens to be the premise on which the continued existence of an International Center for Photography (ICP) rests. Founded in 1974, the ICP explained its mission in terms of keeping "Concerned Photography (1) [or] humanitarian documentary work relevant and visible to the public eye." It was not the merits of photography in general that the institution was touting, but rather the power of a specific genre of photography to initiate change. In the 1980s, with the introduction of skeptical postmodern theory, documentary photography began to fall out of favor amongst academically trained artists, in art criticism, and in museum and art gallery exhibitions. Concentrating on constructed imagery, many postmodern artists took a critical approach to the truth claims of the photographic medium. This exhibition proposes that a new wave of photographers has moved out of the studios and taken to the streets, again "documenting," but in a very different way. This shift in approach provides an ideal opportunity for the ICP to not only revisit the issue of "Concerned Photography" but also to rethink the continued relevance of its own activities.

Although the theme of the Triennial may have been chosen before the events of September 11, 2001, the planning and selection of work for this exhibition certainly came in its wake and--given the frequent evoking of September 11th at the press conference and in the exhibition catalog--seems very much to be a response to this experience. Perhaps, because of this, the exhibition is predictably New York-centric. Of the forty artists who are featured in Strangers, eleven actually live and work in New York City, and an additional four live here part-time. The curators, Brian Wallis, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squires, and Edward Earle, traveled to countless international fairs and exhibitions in an effort to make this one "international" in scope, but it stills falls rather short of the mark, with large areas of the globe un- or under-represented (South America, Asia, Oceania, and the former Eastern Block, most notably). In fact the theme, centered on "the social consequences of globalization through images emanating from encounters between people unknown to one another," lends itself to images from westernized countries. Moreover, by choosing to privilege documentary and photojournalistic images, the works in the exhibition present a rather unified image of humanity, a conflation of cultural differences of the kind found in Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art. It is a difficult decision to theme an "ennial;" it limits one's ability as a curator to include strong work if it doesn't fit the theme and, perhaps more importantly, it abandons the possibility of representing global diversity in favor of thematic coherence. The curators can be applauded in their attempt to give structure to the traditional free-for-all. Yet, despite its exclusionary aspects, this structure works here.

Walking around the exhibition, one's view is flooded with mostly large-scale photographs and projections. With the inclusion of film, video and digital media in the International Center for Photography's first triennial, the ICP indicates an expansion of the definition of photography. However, the qualities specific to each of these media is never grappled with theoretically, and justification for including them in the exhibition is never given. To their credit, though, the curators have found some real surprises, such as Julika Rudelius's Train, where she reconstructs a conversation among a group of adolescent boys violently discussing their sexual pursuits of female counterparts, and Fiona Tan's video transfer film, Facing Forward, where she uses historical ethnographic footage of tribes in New Guinea to address issues of colonialization and the presentation of history. Some of these surprises were found very near to home. Yto Barrada (an anthropologist who took a year-long workshop at the ICP) exhibited oversized prints, and the impact of globalization on her native Morocco, while MIT professor Krzysztof Wodiczko presented Dis-Armor 2, a wearable electronic contraption designed to help Japanese high-school students overcome their shyness through allowing the users to see and to be seen by people standing behind them. There are, of course, also a number of fashionable artists included in the exhibition such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Rineke Dijkstra, both currently showing at galleries in New York. The token Oceanic representative is the Australian Bill Henson, an artist who was perhaps ahead of his time when he began producing these mural-sized images of emaciated, over-sexed youth nearly twenty-five years ago, but whose work now seems overwrought rather than poignant. Lost to this exhibition is the intimate, the small, the "come closer to look at me" photograph. This speaks to the current preference in art circles for oversized prints. But this also could be a trend that the ICP has pushed through its selection. DiCorcia, for example, recently showed similar subject matter but in much smaller prints.