eMuseum

Cornell Capa: Concerned Photographer
Cornell Capa (1918-2008) chose the phrase "concerned photographer" to describe those photographers who demonstrated in their work a humanitarian impulse to use pictures to educate and change the world, not just to record it. During a long and distinguished career as a photographer, Capa worked for Life magazine from 1946 to 1967, and for the Magnum Photos agency beginning in 1954, covering social and political issues in the United States, as well as England, the Soviet Union, Israel, and Central and South America. While he created some iconic individual images, Capa more fully established his own specific areas of concern regarding politics and social issues with incisive and important photo-essays. Included in the show are his stories on the reform government of President Arbenz in Guatemala (1953); the collapse of Juan Perón's dictatorial regime in Argentina (1955); political dissidents arrested after the assassination of Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza (1956); the work of missionaries in Ecuador (1956-58); the plight of indigenous tribes in the north-east of Peru (1961); a significant reportage on conditions at Attica (1972) following the bloody prison uprising; the 1964 senate race of Robert Kennedy; and an analysis of poverty and population in El Salvador and Honduras (1970-73). This exhibition looks at these pioneering stories and serves as a tribute to Capa as photographer and Founding Director of ICP.

Living with the Dead: W. Eugene Smith and World War II
Among the most compelling and heart-rending photographs ever taken of warfare are those made by W. Eugene Smith during World War II. On assignment from Ziff-Davis and LIFE magazine, Smith (1918–1978) covered the Pacific theater from 1943 to 1945. After serving on the carrier U.S.S. Bunker Hill, Smith participated in numerous allied landings, including Guam, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, where he was severely wounded in May 1945.

America and the Tintype
One of the most intriguing and little studied forms of nineteenth-century photography is the tintype. Introduced in 1856 as a low-cost alternative to the daguerreotype and the albumen print, the tintype was widely marketed from the 1860s through the first decades of the twentieth century as the cheapest and most popular photographic medium. Because of its ubiquity, the tintype provides a startlingly candid record of the political upheavals that rocked in the four decades following the American Civil War, and the personal anxieties they induced. The tintype studio became a kind of performance space where sitters could act out their personal identities, displaying the tools of their trade, masks and costumes, toys and dolls, stuffed animals, and props of all sorts. This uniquely American medium provides extraordinary insights into the development of national attitudes and characteristics in the formative years of the early modern era. The exhibition, organized by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis and guest curator Steven Kasher, includes over 150 remarkable examples of tintypes drawn from the Permanent Collection.

JFK for President (September 17 - November 28, 2004)
Photographs by Cornell Capa, 1918-2008

Cornell Capa, who founded ICP in 1974, coined the term "concerned photographer." His own photographs throughout his lifetime remained true to that mission.

JFK for President presents Cornell Capa's photographs of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign and the early days of his administration. The exhibition includes many unpublished color and black-and-white photographs as well as classics first published in LIFE magazine and in the book Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration.

ICP website: JFK for President: Photographs by Cornell Capa.

The catalog of this exhibition is available from the ICP Museum Store.

This Is War! Robert Capa at Work
Selected images from the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive illuminate Capa's working process on six seminal photo essays covering the Spanish Civil War, China, and World War II between 1936 and 1945.

Gerda Taro
In her brief but dramatic career, Gerda Taro (1910-1937) made some of the most striking photographs to come from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. The following selections, drawn from ICP's collection, are also included in the first full-scale retrospective.

David Seymour (Chim), selections
ICP's collection of work by Magnum photographer, Chim (David Seymour) includes about 1,000 items. This selection of 250 will be augmented over time. See also: ICP's site on Chim's work originally prepared in 1998 and an extended biographical web site which launched in 1999.

Reflections in a Glass Eye
This featured selection includes 135 images by noted photographers across a broad range of subjects. It is based on works selected for the ICP 25th anniversary publication.

Reflections in a Glass Eye is available from the ICP Museum Store.

New Photography from China: Acquisitions
In advance of the presentation of Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, ICP acquired a number of major works for the collection.
Exhibition website

Americana Fantastica (January 19 - April 29, 2007)
This selection of beautiful and bizarre images, spanning the history of photography, unveils a rich but little-noted strain of surrealism in American culture. The exhibition highlights recent additions and generous donations to the ICP Permanent Collection.

Donna Ferrato - Living with the Enemy
For over twenty years, Donna Ferrato has been documenting the effects of domestic violence on abused women and their children. Photographing in emergency rooms and shelters, courtrooms and activist rallies, batterers' groups and women's detention centers, Ferrato aims to expose "the dark side of family life." Collected in the exhibition and publication "Living with the Enemy" (Aperture, 1991), these groundbreaking pictures are paired with texts by the photographer drawn from her conversations with the victims and perpetrators of abuse. In addition to a selection of prints from "Living with the Enemy," ICP also maintains an extensive archive of Ferrato's own research materials related to domestic violence as well as to the genesis of this ambitious and ongoing photographic project.

Unknown Weegee (June 9 - August 27, 2006)
Despite his sometimes comic persona, Weegee made his mark as a documentary photographer. His photojournalistic images from the 1930s and '40s demonstrated an uncanny ability to see drama in the everyday life of New York City residents--the reaction of a criminal, the confidence of a diamond-clad socialite, and the exuberance of packed masses at Coney Island on a hot summer day. It was these images that brought him lasting fame. But he did not only take the sensational front-page images. He also probed the New York City social landscape, addressing racial tensions, social stratifications, war-time rations, and Hollywood-infected notions of glamour. Weegee spent twenty years documenting the city and its inhabitants, from the 1930s Depression to the anxious postwar years. Within the constraints of a working photojournalist, Weegee was able to cultivate a distinctive humanist style and a vision of the city that was unapologetically his own.

Weegee Archive, selections
The Weegee archive was bequeathed to ICP in 1993. Weegee (1899-1968) is best known for his tabloid news photographs of urban crowds, crime scenes, and New York City nightlife of the 1930s and 1940s. He later dedicated himself to what he called "creative photography"-images made through distorting lenses and other optical effects. The Weegee Archive contains 20,000 original prints and negatives, tear sheets, manuscript drafts, correspondence, and other personal memorabilia. It is the world's largest holding of Weegee's work.

Roman Vishniac Collection, selections
From 1934 to 1939, Roman Vishniac explored on foot the cities and villages of eastern Europe, recording life in the Jewish shtetlekh (villages) of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania – communities that even then seemed threatened by routine change as much as by the Holocaust that would come.

RA/FSA, selections
Some of the best-known documentary photographs came out of the photographic divisions of two government agencies, established in response to the Depression: the Resettlement Administration (1935 - 1937) and the Farm Security Administration (1937 - 1942). These agencies employed a number of photographers whose work would become an extensive archive of rural America and the effects of government programs created to lessen the impact of poverty. The permanent collection at ICP contains photographs that Theodor Jung, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn took around the country while employed by the RA and FSA.
View the finding aid for this collection.

El Salvador (September 16 - November 27, 2005)
In 1983, at the height of the civil war in El Salvador, thirty international photojournalists covering the conflict contributed to a project to raise awareness about the crisis. Photographers Susan Meiselas and Harry Mattison, who collected the work for a book and traveling exhibition, believed that these images, if more widely seen, could facilitate a deeper understanding of the situation in El Salvador and prompt a crucial dialogue about the conflict and America's role in it.

LIFE Magazine Collection, selections
LIFE Magazine Collections
This selection of work by W. Eugene Smith is among 1,000 photographs donated by The Time Picture Collection, Inc. in 2005.

John Heartfield, periodical illustrations, 1930s
In spring 2005, the ICP Acquisitions Committee supported the purchase of sixty-three John Heartfield photomontages published in the German illustrated newspapers Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung and Volks Illustriete from 1930 to 1937.

African American Vernacular Photography
The Daniel Cowin Collection of African American History was given to ICP by Daniel Cowin in 1990. The collection of about 1,600 photographs, including several albums and dating from 1860 to 1960, offers a glimpse into the rarely seen everyday lives of African Americans in a variety of genres and poses: formal studio portraits, casual snapshots, images of children, images of uniformed soldiers, wedding portraits, and "Southern-views" made for tourist consumption. While some of the sitters are celebrities of the day, the majority are unnamed Americans simply posing for their portraits.

The catalog of the exhibition is available from the ICP Museum Store.

David Seidner Archive, selections
David Seidner (1957-1999) was a fashion and portrait photographer known for his stylized images inspired by historical paintings and sculptures. He rose to prominence with images that visually cut up couture designed by Azzedine Alaia, Chanel, Mme. Grès, Jean Patou, Ungaro, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent and collaged them together through multiple exposures or reflections in pieces of mirror. Seidner published these images in Harper's Bazaar, Harper's & Queen, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and international editions of Vogue in the 1980s and 90s, greatly influencing fashion photography for over a decade. In addition to his advertising and editorial fashion work, Seidner also pursued other projects dealing with portraiture, clothing, the body, and the history of art. This selection, drawn from the David Seidner Archive of over 2,000 prints, includes highlights from Seidner's major projects and series.

September 11 Archive
Since September 11, 2001, the International Center of Photography has maintained the September 11 Archive, a collection of photographic materials related to the events of that day. The archive of over fifteen hundred objects includes a comprehensive collection of newspapers from September 11 and the following days, a portion of the exhibition "Here is New York," photographs by photojournalists and bystanders, missing persons posters, publications, videos, and other historical artifacts.

AIDS Graphics, selections
In 1987, during the early years of the AIDS crisis, a group of New York artists and activists formed ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to raise awareness about the growing epidemic. ACT UP, and later Gran Fury and other groups, made visually striking posters, pamphlets, stickers, and T-shirts that challenged the slow response by the U.S. government and others to the rapidly spreading disease. Many of these printed materials utilized photography and photomontage, and most were created for specific media events or demonstrations. The collection of AIDS material maintained at ICP includes many of the key pieces made by members of ACT UP during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as art produced by other activist collectives. Significantly, the collection also includes photographs that show how the posters and other materials were used in demonstrations.

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