Current Exhibitions

Gordon Parks: 100 Years

May 18, 2012–January 6, 2013

To commemorate the centennial of the birth of photographer, filmmaker, musician, and writer Gordon Parks (1912–2006), the International Center of Photography in cooperation with The Gordon Parks Foundation will present the installation Gordon Parks: 100 Years, including a large-scale photo mural and slideshow of more than 50 photographs he captured throughout his long, illustrious career. The installation was curated by Dr. Maurice Berger. The 20-foot-by-13-foot photo mural features Emerging Man, one of Parks' iconic images captured in Harlem in 1952. Three video screens will display his stunning images, which explore such issues as urban and rural poverty, racism and prejudice, politics, and the historic Civil Rights Movement. Gordon Parks: 100 Years was curated by Berger in conjunction with ICP and The Gordon Parks Foundation, a division of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation.

Weegee: Murder Is My Business

May 18–September 2, 2012

For an intense decade between 1935 and 1946, Weegee (1899–1968) was one of the most relentlessly inventive figures in American photography. His graphically dramatic and often lurid photographs of New York crimes and news events set the standard for what has become known as tabloid journalism. Freelancing for a variety of New York newspapers and photo agencies, and later working as a stringer for the short-lived liberal daily PM (1940–48), Weegee established a way of combining photographs and texts that was distinctly different from that promoted by other picture magazines, such as LIFE. Utilizing other distribution venues, Weegee also wrote extensively (including his autobiographical Naked City, published in 1945) and organized his own exhibitions at the Photo League. This exhibition draws upon the extensive Weegee Archive at ICP and includes environmental recreations of Weegee's apartment and exhibitions. The exhibition is organized by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis.

Christer Strömholm: Les Amies de Place Blanche

May 18–September 2, 2012

Christer Strömholm (1918–2002) was one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, but he is little known outside of his native Sweden. This exhibition presents his most powerful and acclaimed body of work: Les Amies de la Place Blanche, a documentation of transsexual street hustlers in Paris in the 1960s. Arriving in Paris in the late 1950s, Strömholm settled in Place Blanche in the heart of the city's red-light district. There, he befriended and photographed young transsexuals struggling to live as women and to raise money for sex-change operations. Strömholm's surprisingly intimate portraits and lush Brassaï-like night scenes form a magnificent, dark, and at times quite moving photo album, a vibrant tribute to these girls, the "girlfriends of La Place Blanche." The photographs were first published in Sweden in 1983, and the book quickly sold out, becoming a cult classic; it is being reissued in French and English this year. Strömholm's photo-essay raises profound issues about sexuality and gender; as he wrote in 1983, "It was then—and still is—about obtaining the freedom to choose one's own life and identity." This exhibition, the first presentation of Strömholm's work in an American museum, is organized by ICP Curatorial Assistant Pauline Vermare.

President in Petticoats! Civil War Propaganda in Photographs

May 18–September 2, 2012

As the American Civil War ground to a dispiriting and unheroic end after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee's rebel forces and the shocking assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in mid-April 1865, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, became a political fugitive. At dawn on May 10, 1865, a contingent of Michigan cavalry captured Davis in a makeshift camp outside Irwinville, Georgia. In his haste to flee, Davis grabbed his wife's overcoat rather than his own. News reports immediately circulated that Davis had been apprehended in women's clothes and that he was attempting to disguise himself as a woman. Northern artists and caricaturists seized upon these rumors of cowardly escape and created wildly inventive images, some using photomontage, to sensationalize the political story. Photographers circulated and even pirated dozens of fanciful photographic cards; many used a photographic portrait of Davis on a hand-drawn body in a woman's dress, hat, and crinoline, but wearing his own boots, the detail that supposedly betrayed him to his captors. The exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator of Collections Erin Barnett.

A Short History of Photography: From the ICP Collection Honoring Willis E. Hartshorn, Ehrenkranz Director

May 18–September 2, 2012

In honor of its Ehrenkranz Director Willis Hartshorn, the International Center of Photography presents an engaging survey of its vast and unique collection of photographs. Founded in 1975, as part of the original concept for the Center, the photograph collection at ICP now contains well over 100,000 photographs, ranging from the 1840s to the present. This provocative selection by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis is an investigation of the aesthetics and uses of photographic images, and includes well-loved classics as well as little-known works by anonymous photographers. One of the hallmarks of the collection is a focus on alternative histories of photography, including marginalized social practices of photography as well as popular and nonart approaches to the medium. Eugène Atget, W. Eugene Smith, Cindy Sherman, Walker Evans, and André Kertész are among the photographers included in this wide-ranging exhibition.