ICP Triennial Strangers: "Presenting the works of forty contemporary artists from around the world.

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 characters that photography now plays in negotiating the boundaries between trust and fear, intimacy and isolation, and public and private life. This exhibition organized through the International Center of Photography in of the present day York, Strangers investigates, as well, the social connections of globalization through images emanating from onsets between people unknown to undivided another." (from the catalog)

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

International Center for Photography,

just discovered 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 spectacle Why else would we ne an international inspect of art photography in 2003? Of course, it also happens to be the premise upon which the continued existence of an International Center for Photography (ICP) reposes Founded in 1974, the ICP explained its mission in seasons 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, yet rather the power of a specific genre of photography to initiate change. In the 1980 with the introduction of skeptical postmodern theory, documentary photography began to fall revealed of favor amongst academically trained artists, in art criticism, and in museum and art gallery exhibitions. Concentrating forward constructed imagery, many postmodern artists took a critical approach to the canon claims of the photographic medium. This exhibition moves that a new wave of photographers has mov disclosed of the studios and taken to the roads again "documenting," but in a same different way. This shift in approach provides an ideal opportunity for the ICP to not simply revisit the issue of "Concern Photography" on the contrary also to rethink the continued relevance of its be in possession of activities.

Although the theme of the Triennial may have been chosen before the affairs of September 11, 2001, the planning and selection of work for this exhibition certainly came in its wake and--given the of common occurrence evoking of September 11th at the pres discourse and in the exhibition catalog--seems to a high degree much to be a answer to this experience. Perhaps, because of this, the exhibition is predictably strange York-centric. Of the forty artists who are featured in Strangers, eleven actually live and work in just discovered York City, and an additional four live here part-time. The curators, Brian Wallis, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squires, and Edward Earle, traveled to countles international fairs and exhibitions in an effort to make this the same "international" in scope, but it stills falls rather short of the mark, with large areas of the globe un- or under-represent (South America, Asia, Oceania, and the former Eastern shut up most notably). In fact the theme, center forward "the social consequences of globalization by the and of images emanating from encounters between tribe unknown to one another," loans itself to images from westernized countries. Moreover, according to choosing to privilege documentary and photojournalistic images, the works in the exhibition quick in emergencies a rather unified image of humanity, a conflation of cultural differences of the kind base in Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition Family of Man at the Museum of fresh Art. It is a difficult decision to theme an "ennial;" it limits one's ability as a curator to include efficient 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 make to the traditional free-for-all. notwithstanding despite its exclusionary aspects, this make works here.

Walking around the exhibition, one's view is overflowed 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 none grappled with theoretically, and justification for including them in the exhibition is at no time given. To their credit, granting the curators have found any real surprises, such as Julika Rudelius's Train, where she rebuilds a conversation among a arrange 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 of recent origin Guinea to address issues of colonialization and the presentation of history. about of these surprises were establish 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 forward her native Morocco, while MIT professor Krzysztof Wodiczko currented Dis-Armor 2, a wearable electronic contraption designed to help Japanese high-school observers overcome their shyness through allowing the users to descry and to be seen on people standing behind them. There are, of course, also a number of fashionable artists included in the exhibition as it was as Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Rineke Dijkstra, one as well as the other currently showing at galleries in strange 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-sex youth nearly twenty-five years ago, yet whose work now seems overdone rather than poignant. Lost to this exhibition is the intimate, the small, the "come closer to await at me" photograph. This speaks to the rife preference in art circles for oversized prints. yet this also could be a trending that the ICP has pushed from one side its selection. DiCorcia, for example, newly showed similar subject matter still in much smaller prints.