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To continue from last week on ICP, the International Center of Photography would like you to know: it is concerned.

It is concerned not just about you, politics and wars, or even the planet, although its center of concern has been growing ever since its founding. A celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, through March 6, encompasses more than one hundred fifty works, spanning at least as many years and much of the globe. It has kept rethinking photography along the way. What began as the hopes of a leading photojournalist to keep his vision alive has changed, along with its name. “ICP at 50” opens with portraits of Americans, but African Americans—as couples, at choir practice, and alone. It cannot be an accident that its concern for dignity leads into a second, smaller show of David Seidner, a white fashion photographer who died of AIDS, while new acquisitions in photography at the Morgan Library seem blissfully secure.

The center’s very origins lay in concern, and the C in ICP first stood for just that. Cornell Capa created the International Fund for Concerned Photography in 1956, in concert with Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymore, Werner Bischof, and Dan Weiner, becoming the ICP we know in 1974. To this day, it boasts of the lines out the door for its opening. I still miss how well its Fifth Avenue mansion showed off photography, although I have followed it on its journey to a midtown office lobby, a basement space on the Bowery, and (with luck) a permanent home on the Lower East Side across from the Essex Market. It may not have space off the entrance for more than coffee and a gift shop, but it has a library, media labs, and a school. One of two floors for galleries has narrow walkways, but it pays off in the drama of looking down, not to a bloated museum atrium, but to art.

It can also boast of the two hundred thousand prints in its collection, so many that “ICP at 50” can handle only one per photographer. (You will just have to take its word that Elisabeth Sherman, Sara Ickow, and Haley Kane as curators, examined each and every one.) The show is a survey of photography all by itself. The section on the nineteenth century also points to a changing medium—from tintypes that allowed only one-off prints to plates that could print again and again. An unknown photographer, it turns out, printed in color as early as 1935, decades before the saturated colors of Helen Levitt and William Eggleston. But then Levitt’s photo of legs sticking out from under a car is street photography, too.

ICP will always have a soft spot for photojournalism. It has had recent shows of Magnum Photos, with its dedication to social history, and Robert Capa in Spain. The older of the Capa brothers, he witnessed the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of those who fought against fascism and lost. Sure enough, the poster photo for “ICP at 50,” by Gerda Taro, depicts a Spanish militia member in dramatic profile, raising her pistol. The show then leaps ahead to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Weiner, and JFK shaking hands from Cornell Capa himself. One need not claim a photo of the lunar lander for fine art, not when it is credited to NASA rather than an artist, but why try when the medium reaches to the moon?

Still, the story continues. Diversity remains in focus well after early black America. Gordon Parks has Ralph Ellison in a midnight hideaway like the protagonist of Invisible Man, but with music, making blackness audible and visible. Paul Mpagi Sepuya puts his own black body in question in a mirror study, and Mickalene Thomas looks as ever at herself. For once, her glitzy self sits off center and closer to the rear of her tacky surroundings. Taro’s Spaniard is kneeling, as much to display her youth and beauty as to take better aim.

Just ticking off the women contributors would be a lost cause. Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson continue their unraveling of black identity, in the case of Simpson with enigmatic text. Others were creating modern photography, including Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Ilse Bing, whose shades of gray look more vivid and mournful every day. Still others mark the shift to present-day concerns. It is not just a matter of feminism or a matter of pride. When an unseen woman for Lee Friedlander casts her shadow on another woman, her back to the camera, she is casting a long shadow on photography itself.

It is about what photography does and is. For An-My Lê, photography’s public record can only approach her private history as a woman from Vietnam. But then ICP has always had its private side, like the intimate records of “Love Songs,” “Face to Face,” and “Close Enough” in just the last year. It has also begun to challenge photography as a reliable medium. That is where Postmodernism and such women as Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, and Barbara Bloom come in. Simmons and Lawler have their dolls and rephotography, while Bloom needs a whole wall to place images in an uncertain museum context—and I pick up the story of ICP’s formal and private sides another time, along with a look at photographs at the Morgan Library.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

“I’m HIV positive. It doesn’t have to be negative.” So runs a magazine ad that David Seidner accompanied with his own photograph, of himself. Can his optimism withstand his dying and his anxiety over what he had become as an image maker?

The International Center of Photography opens with a self-portrait. Retrospectives often do, but Seidner was a fashion photographer first and foremost. It consumed pretty much the entirety of a sadly abbreviated life. Yet surely fashion photography is not about the photographer, right—and not about art? Such, at least, is convention, but his torn allegiance powered some provocative art, through March 6. You can only return to “ICP at 50” chastened and questioning.

Photography is always about looking, through the camera and the human eye behind it. It is also about making you want to look—for photojournalism, at the urgency of breaking events. For fashion photography, that means making you look at a look that you will want for yourself. It is a work for hire about work for sale, and Seidner knew that, too. He snagged a contract, an exclusive contract, with Yves Saint Laurent. He loved it because photography for him was always about appearances, ones that he could manipulate and turn on himself.

Seidner in that self-portrait is lying down, seductive, provocative, and vulnerable. He turns the camera on other men as well, with an overlaid black grid. It defines his work as art back when the grid of late Modernism ruled. It also highlights the body and dismembers it. That can mean a naked body, a clothed body, or, in other work, a fragment of clothing alone. It is a polished image but also a teaser for what may never come.

He brings the same versatility to fashion. He directs the eye to the model and the designer, and he does not distinguish the two. A magazine feature about a designer requires no less. He elevates his subject while taking it apart and reassembling it, with multiple exposures and with mirrors. Nicely dressed store mannequins look more individual and alive than many a professional model. One can almost claim to know what they are thinking.

If that were not sufficiently a matter of art, Seidner devotes a series from the 1990s to well-known artists. Hung in four rows of four photos apiece, their unsmiling faces appear up close, approaching you and challenging you. Naturally he includes himself, as a boast but also in wonder as to whether he belongs. And then he is back with clothing, billowing outward. One hardly knows whether he has fallen prey more than ever to fashion or turned away from the model. The conventions and the fashion still turn me off, but they have me thinking.

An eye to appearances is also an eye on gender, and Seidner was gay. He died of AIDS in 1999, at forty-two. One might see his work as his coming out or anxiety about his identity. It has its parallel in art and anti-art photography of his time, like that the self-portrait as a pose for Cindy Sherman or dolls in place of mannequins for Laurie Simmons. It looks ahead to painting by women today that makes a point of the body but minimizes the self-questioning. I hardly know whether to call Seidner more or less radical for that.

He accords with the current interest not in minimizing fine art, but in refusing to set it apart from design and craft—no more than photography from painting. Museum shows of fashion are still mostly pandering, but the Jewish Museum has recovered magazine photography for art as well. ICP sees Seidner as long neglected but vital to its collection (pairing it with its fiftieth anniversary show, no less). It has his tear sheets, but it ends with something else again. A final series sets orchids in blurred close-up against a backdrop of fabric. It becomes pure color, but still an emblem of impending death.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Immigration keeps making headlines—and making art. Sheida Soleimani in Tribeca and, before her, Daniel Shieh on Governors Island could not stop thinking about their parents and rites of passage to the United States. But the voices in their head keep multiplying, and Shieh is still singing the national anthem.

Now immigration is only the first story in “Immersion,” where Raymond Meeks, Vasantha Yogananthan, and Gregory Halpern look to photography for a sense of place, at the International Center of Photography through January 8.

ICP can hardly avoid taking immigration as a fact of life, apart from “Immersion.” With some two hundred fifty photographs of Marlene Dietrich on loan from Pierre Passebon, it features an actress who fled the Nazis in 1930, the very year of The Blue Angel, and contributed what she could to her adopted country, from the movies to the USO. With so rabid a fan and collector behind the show, it cannot help attributing the work of Hollywood’s top photographers and directors to her, her “personal wardrobe,” and “signature lighting.” Still, she is only one of those behind the film stills, publicity stills, and shots on set—and who can be confident telling them apart? A floor below Dietrich, Muriel Hasbun has made her way from El Salvador to France and, ultimately, the District of Columbia. Along with her complicated history, she is describing a supremely blended family, as I explain separately.

As for “Immersion,” could there be more to immigration than makes the news? One could almost forget the families lining up for Ellis Island to this day—not for admission to this country, but to claim it as their heritage. When Meeks tells of immigration to France, he is not speaking about boat people from Africa and risks of death. He is tracing the passage from the First World, from the United Kingdom and Spain, without an immigrant in sight. All photographs are traces, of chemicals in response to light. Meeks, though, finds the traces of humanity in where it trod.

He sees immigration as a kind of earthworks, from a circle of branches to rocks rising like totems from the sea. Craggy cliffs must have offered handholds but tough going. Still, traces have by definition faded and given way, and these look more faint than formidable. It can seem like cheating not to mention the fate of those who made the crossing or the reception they received, of hatred or welcome. It humanizes a political debate all the same. It also finds an alternative definition of the “real” France, not in a language and culture, but in the changing earth.

ICP introduces all three photographers as constructing a sense of place, not just in where they worked, but in their collected work as installation. Each has a room to himself, and individual photos vary greatly in size and in how they hang. Yogananthan shoots black children at play in New Orleans, just past the age of innocence. Taken together, the photos could suggest a playground. And yet they have no obvious object or rules of the game. The intensity of daylight or of shadows at dusk is itself way too strong for just playing around.

Halpern adds sculpture, a bust atop a short pillar with a cinder block and steel at its base. He needs it to give Guadeloupe a history. It is the bust of Christopher Columbus, erected by French administrators in 1915, while photos look back to the imprisonment of slaves and the abolition of slavery. It is not, though, a linear or progressive history. The bust finds its echoes in the mask that a young woman holds just apart from her face. Text on slavery appears in a tattoo, because that, too, has left its traces.

I am not convinced that I am seeing installations. I am not certain, for that matter, of a shared sense of politics and place. Yet I know it matters, and each country deserves a history all its own. So does each photographer. In context, they also have a collective message. A native’s or immigrant’s tale does not begin or end with birth or immigration.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Not every artist is in search of her roots, but Muriel Hasbun has them abundantly. She can look beneath the surface to dental records from the past, because her father was a dentist. She can look deep into the earth as well, to seismic records, including from El Salvador, where she was born in 1961.

In her photography, they become part of a personal history, a family history, and a history of her time. They are testimony to her love, at the International Center of Photography through January 8. If they are no less shadowy for that, in several languages and in cryptic images, she knows the shadows as intimately as the substance. Together with past reports on family matters at ICP, it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

One expects multiculturalism in art these days, but not often like this. Hasbun’s mother was Jewish, half French and half Polish, and was fortunate in escaping the Nazis—first to Paris from Vichy, then across the Atlantic. A photo shows her when she arrived. Hasbun calls it Je Me Souviens, or “I remember,” and surely she herself remembers as well. Her father was Christian, half Salvadorian and half Palestinian. Si Je Meurs Je Me Souviens, a later title runs, or “If I Die I Remember,” and she insists on memories, even in death.

She herself fled El Salvador in 1979, after a right-wing military coup soon embraced by Ronald Reagan’s United States—first to France and then to Washington, D.C. She could have been in search of her mother’s past as much as her own present, but these things for Hasbun are hard to pull apart. (She also has a degree in French lit.) All this could easily become a dry litany, but for her they are about not a cultural affiliation, but the family she knew. It is not so easy to make art about love without its becoming a record of loss as well, as in “Love Songs” at ICP just this year. But that, too, is a part of life.

The show itself has a multilingual title, “Tracing Terruño,” or home ground. “What are these roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” For T. S. Eliot “a heap of broken images,” but exactly that makes “The Waste Land” a satisfying poem and Hasbun’s photography a satisfying art. Santos y Sombra from the 1990s mixes recovered and original images to evoke its saints and shadows. They run to tropical silhouettes against pale skies, at times with overlays added in the darkroom. They, too, are what a title calls Presencia, and Todos los Santos (Para Subir al Cielo), or “All the Saints (to Go Up to Heaven).”

Heaven may not be easy to reach, but it still comes down equally to family and art. She applies chemicals to photographic plates with her grandmother’s rags, so that they pay homage at once to May Ray in Surrealism and to home. The dental x-rays might seem to step away from anything at all familiar, but they, too, look in all directions. As X Post Facto, they might be pillars in a dry landscape or mathematical unknowns. They also simply come after. Yet they look all the more nuanced and colorful for their detachment.

Seismic disruptions enter with Pulse: New Cultural Registers starting in 2020. (An earlier Central American landscape did show a volcano.) Some prints have thick black frames, setting off the presences. Others look paler than ever, with physical layers like people in their clothing. Her grandmother returns in person, I shall guess to honor her death. The work has become more physical, but also more elusive and ephemeral. It is shaking things up.

Hasbun has had other work that does not quite fit, almost always in series. Still, this is enough for a sizable retrospective and a sprawling history. It also has resonances with “Immersion,” a three-person show on the same floor. It, too, is creating a sense of place, of home turf. It has the taller rooms, while Hasbun has the longer walls, in accord with her traditionalism and persistence. One can think of the entire show as her only installation and her only home.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.