By HOLLAND COTTER
In an interview, the singer
Nina Simone once said, “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times,” by which she
meant, basically, politics of the day, and in her case, racial politics. “I
think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians,” she added. “As
far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I choose to reflect the times.”
Institutions can make that
choice, too. The International Center of Photography did when it opened its
doors in 1974 as a showcase for socially concerned photography, which encompassed
photojournalism and so-called street photography. For over 40 years, the center
has stayed on mission, even as the technology of picture-making has expanded,
and the main street has become the internet.
A new exhibition,
“Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change,” reflects those shifts.
It’s as committedly topical as anything the center has done, with sections
focused on climate change, immigration, gender issues, racial turmoil,
terrorism and the 2016 election. At the same time, it looks different from
shows past because digital media — smartphone videos, Twitter outtakes,
Instagram feeds — outnumber photographic prints.
The embrace of the digital
was probably inevitable for the center, an institution that clearly doesn’t
want to freeze into a yesterday-museum. But it necessitates a rethinking of old
ideas. It requires seeing photography as part of a larger, amorphous category,
one morally up for grabs, called visual culture. And it requires recognizing
that in the digital present, visual culture does more than reflect reality: For
better and for worse, it creates it.
An image from Mel Chin’s
“The Arctic Is Paris,” shot during the 2015 United Nations Climate
For the center, the
transition has been bumpy. It started decisively with the 2016 exhibition
“Public, Private, Secret,” the institution’s inaugural venture on the Bowery.
Some people loathed the show, finding it a meanspirited mess that mixed too
many media to no discernible end. (For me, it captured the random, narcissistic
viciousness of internet culture to a T, and gave it a history.) “Perpetual
Revolution” is an improvement.
It pushes the use of new
media even further, but in a directed way, and with nuances attributable, my
guess is, to the fact that this is a group effort. The center curators Carol
Squiers and Cynthia Young have led a team that includes the assistant curators
Susan Carlson and Claartje van Dijk, and the adjunct curators Joanna Lehan and
Kalia Brooks, with assistance from Akshay Bhoan and Quito Ziegler. Different
curators handled individual sections, but everyone was working with a shared
model.
The opening section, on
climate change, gives a sense of the governing method. It starts with a
familiar photograph: the 1968 NASA shot of the Earth, as seen from the moon, an
image that became a kind of logo for a nascent ecology movement, which produced
the Environmental Protection Agency two years later. Next comes a bit of
digital wizardry in a recent video charting temperature changes across the
globe during roughly the past century. Then the apocalypse, or what looks like
one, in a clip from the 2012 film “Chasing Ice,” in which melting glaciers,
filmed by the American photographer James Balog, split apart and collapse in
agonized slow motion.
Other works bring
cosmically scaled events down to ground level. In a mural-like collage, made
from internet-sourced photos and Post-it notes, the artist Rachel Schragis
reconstructs the New York People’s Climate March of 2014. Instagram pictures by
the Native American photographer Camille Seaman document a protest in progress
against the laying of a fuel pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in
North Dakota.
Here we’re in breaking-news
territory. The collage, with its miniature banners and countless, tightly
packed figures, looks like a flashback, or flash-forward, to the recent Women’s
March. Ms. Seaman’s photographs are whiplash reminders that, in his first week
in office as president, Donald J. Trump not only ordered a go-ahead for the
pipeline but also imposed a communications blackout on the E.P.A.
You’d be hard-pressed to
find any relief to this grim picture, though the show comes up with one in a
fanciful video by Mel Chin, shot in Paris during the 2015 United Nations
Climate Change Conference, when the city was still reeling from terrorist attacks.
The film makes the point that all violence — personal, ideological,
environmental — is connected. And it does so through an apparitional figure: an
Inuit visitor who drives a sled pulled by French poodles through Paris parks
and insists that the earth’s condition, though dire, is reparable if people
will lay down their arms and work together.
The show’s second section,
“The Flood: Refugees and Representation,” also blends static and moving images,
but makes a strong case for traditional photography as a form of evidence and a
vehicle of emotion. There’s digital work here, including a video starring — and
that’s the right word — an unfailingly cheerful Syrian refugee named Thair
Orfahli, who documented a hazardous Mediterranean crossing and a rescue by the Italian
coast guard in emails, tweets, videos and selfies generated by his smartphone,
his only possession.
It’s a spirit lifter to
encounter Mr. Orfahli (and infuriating to think that if he’d arrived on
American shores under our newly proposed refugee policies, he might have been
turned away). Yet my eye kept returning to conventional photographs hung or
projected on the gallery wall: to black-and-white images of people trying to
flee war-torn Europe in the 1930s and ’40s, by Robert Capa and Ruth Gruber; and
2015 pictures of Middle Eastern refugees arriving, exhausted and shaken, in
Greece, by Daniel Etter and Sergey Ponomarev.
Is my partly unconscious
preference for the still picture simply the result of long-established habits
of looking? Or is there another, resistant factor involved? When I look at
moving images, my viewing time and pace is predetermined; I’m on someone else’s
clock. When I look at a photograph, I’m on my own clock. I see an image, but I
also have the option of contemplating it, living in it, savoring its details,
thinking it through.
The show picks up on the
bottom level of the center’s duplex space, with nearly three dozen photographs
in a section called “Black Lives (Have Always) Mattered.” These pictures are
from the center’s collection and constitute a capsule tour of African-American
history from before the Civil War to the 1960s.
It’s a story of heroes
(Marian Anderson, Elizabeth Eckford) and horrors (an 1863 shot of a man’s
whip-scarred back; a 1968 picture of a Black Panthers’ office window pierced by
police bullets). It’s also about everyday African-American life, intrinsically
political and captured in images of 19th-century cotton field workers; World
War I soldiers; black members of the South Carolina legislature during
Reconstruction.
And the chronicle is
brought up to date in three strong video pieces connected to the Black Lives
Matter movement. One, by the collective HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican?, is a solid
wall of images, playing on 32 stacked monitors, related to the killing of
Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. Another is a set of
digital memorials to Philando Castile, who was also killed by a white officer,
compiled by the Minnesota website Pollen Midwest. And the third video, by
Sheila Pree Bright, layers old and recent documentary material, including Ms.
Simone’s interview, to make a case for a new black civil rights movement. And
that movement overlaps with another, explored in an adjoining section called
“The Fluidity of Gender.”
The fact that two of the
founders of Black Lives Matter — Alicia Garza and Patrisse Khan-Cullors — are
gay women is just one point of intersection; there are many. Although the
L.G.B.T.Q. movement has been substantially documented, a visual history of the
current transgender revolution is in the start-up stage. The show does its part
to expand the record, much of it in digital form.
There are a few vintage
items: a video clip of the transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen, giving a
poised, no-nonsense press interview in 1952; and a sassy slide-show paean to
1980s performers by Linda Simpson titled “The Drag Explosion.” A lot of what’s
here, though, is new. From last year comes the music video “I Am Her,” by the
African-American trans singer Shea Diamond, and one by the self-described
multigendered Mykki Blanco (born Michael David Quattlebaum Jr.), delivering a
rap version of Zoe Leonard’s 1992 election-year anthem about wanting a lesbian
for president.
The ethnic variety of this
section is wide, as suggested by hashtags like #queerappalachia and #QueerMuslim.
And the degree, and kind, of self-invention is dizzying, and contagious.
Unsurprisingly, this sense
of openness bumps up hard against the show’s penultimate section, “Propaganda
and the Islamic State,” which consists of ISIS promotional videos. Designed for
internet distribution, they’re complicated and artful. They, too, play with
self-invention and theater, but with the aim of hammering down, rather than
loosening up, utopian possibilities.
It’s oppressive stuff,
installed, as if for maximum discretion, like a traditional photography
display: a line of small, harmless-looking framed things — video screens in
this case — on the wall. Oppressive, too, is the exhibition’s coda, “The
Right-Wing Fringe and the 2016 Election.” With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
as the primary platforms for its racist and misogynistic images, it suggests
two things.
One, that with the unedited
flow of visual information now streaming through the internet, “concerned
photography” has both a weaker, and potentially more powerful, presence than
ever. And, two, that to an unprecedented degree, images — call them art or not
— reflect and shape the times.
At the moment, the shaping
power is up for grabs by opposing revolutions, one led by the White House, the
other by feet in the street. The street needs to take visual culture —
including photography — and make it its own, right now. This is where artists
come in.
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