2017 Global Fine Art Award for Best Photography

Organized by ICP Curators Carol Squiers and Cynthia Young, Assistant Curators Susan Carlson and Claartje van Dijk, along with adjunct curators Joanna Lehan and Kalia Brooks with assistance from Akshay Bhoan and Quito Ziegler, Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change continues ICP’s long-standing tradition of exploring the social and historic impact of visual culture.

Today, viewers are barraged by seemingly endless streams of new kinds of media images on an unprecedented scale. Perpetual Revolution explores the relation between the overwhelming image world that confronts us, and the volatile, provocative, and often-violent social world it mirrors.

This exhibition proposes that an ongoing revolution is taking place politically, socially, and technologically, and that new digital methods of image production, display, and distribution are simultaneously both reporting and producing social change. The epic social and political transformations of the last few years would not have happened with the speed and in such depth if it weren’t for the ever-expanding possibilities offered by this revolution.

Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change presents six of these critical issues transformed by visual culture: #BlackLivesMatter, gender fluidity, climate change, terrorist propaganda, the right-wing fringe and the 2016 election, and the refugee crisis.

TOP IMAGE: Sheila Pree Bright, #1960Now: Art + Intersection, 2015. © Sheila Pree Bright

Sergey Ponomarev [Refugees arrive by a Turkish boat near the village of Skala, on the Greek Island of Lesbos], November 16, 2015 Digital image, 9 monitors Original photograph © Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Rachel Schragis, Confronting the Climate: A Flowchart of the People’s Climate March, 2014–16 Mixed media collage, 3 x 12 feet © Rachel Schragis
James Balog, Chasing Ice, 2012. Video. © 2016 Chasing Inc., LLC
Kristen Parker Lovell, Kristen Parker Lovell (left) and Kenyatta Kahn (right), from Trans in Media 2 (still), 2015 Video © Kristen Parker Lovell
Abu Muslim from Canada [Andre Poulin], an ISIS recruitment film, 2014 Video
Sheila Pree Bright, #1960Now: Art + Intersection [still], 2015 Video © Sheila Pree Bright
Sheila Pree Bright, #1960Now: Art + Intersection [still], 2015 Video © Sheila Pree Bright
Resistance, ca. 2015. Screenshot

Special Thanks

This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the ICP Exhibitions Committee, the Compton Foundation, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.