Where the Action Is

John Haber
in New York City

ICP on Essex Street

Hip-Hop, Tyler Mitchell, and New York Stories

It has been a long journey, but the International Center of Photography has landed where the action is, on the Lower East Side. Its new building has all the flash of today's art market. Still, it bows respectfully to high Modernism, and, at just three stories, has its eyes close to the ground.

It reunites its greatly expanded display space with ICP's library, media labs, and school. It has more varied galleries as well, from a central room ready for a party to a slim mezzanine that takes one picture at a time. It also completes the transition from a home for photography's history to a center for mixed media and "A Visual History of Hip-Hop." Other opening shows bow to face-recognition technology and the movies, with James Couple, and to sight and sound installations, with Tyler Mitchell. Still, it has not quite left its or the neighborhood's history behind. Photos of immigrants complement "New York Stories" at the Museum of the City of New York.

Billboards and infrastructure

Rather than "the action," I might as well have called it what it is, gentrification. Opened January 2020, ICP fits right into block after block of glass towers rising along Delancey Street. If it cannot quite compete with the new Essex Street market (or Market Line), what can? Besides, if you are drawn first to the food, fine. The view is better anyway from the sidewalk across the street. Look up and you will see a variation on the classic glass cube, but with a serious touch of self-publicity.

Where the new Whitney Museum adds function at the expense of an institutional form, ICP's façade stays sleek, simple, and welcoming. Gensler had a hand in the expanded Museum of Modern Art, but here the architect has the chance to design from scratch. Broad bands frame and separate the floors, as part of the exterior or visible within. That leaves broad windows for transparency and lightness. Through them, the top two floors display blown-up images from the exhibitions, facing onto the street. While they amount to billboards, they make a serious impression in black and white.

In one, African Americans overflow a stoop in Harlem. Gordon Parks builds on his earlier group portrait of the jazz era—but hip-hop, he asserts, takes in a wider community. The other, by Weegee in 1944, shows a boisterous, overweight woman as "Sammy's Mae West." Sammy's bar, "the poor man's stork club," attracted sailors and photographers like him and Lisette Model as well. (Did I mention that Model contributes a Gypsy Queen and Black Dwarf? ) If hip-hop can look back to art photography with Parks, the Lower East Side had its advertisements for itself all along.

They mark the end of that long journey, with each stop along the way a bow to its time. I still miss ICP's brick mansion on Fifth Avenue, when photography capped off Museum Mile. It moved to a midtown office building, just as art was becoming big business—and then the Bowery, just as art was moving downtown. If its basement gallery felt crowded and confining, it opened with "Public, Private, Secret" about the surveillance state. Now James Couple updates the threat for the latest deepfake algorithms. If you pose at a lobby touchscreen, you may find yourself in chaotic and bombastic crowd scenes on wall-length projections back upstairs.

Museums depend these days on t-shirts and tote bags, and ICP devotes its entire first floor to the bookstore and admissions desk—tunneling right along to a back entrance on Ludlow Street. Still, where too many museums, like MoMA's 2004 expansion of the Morgan Library under Renzo Piano in 2007, can seem more concerned for lobbies and coffee shops than their collections, here the only atrium is integral to the display space. Part of the second floor lacks a ceiling, creating that third-floor mezzanine. From it, one can appreciate older photographs or take a second look down to hip-hop.

The galleries vary further, giving curator choices for photography's last century—and, like Maya Lin's SculptureCenter, preserve a view of the infrastructure through steel mesh overhead. Unlike a true atrium, the space below the mezzanine accommodates partitions. Each display floor also has smaller rooms to the west. One might mistake colored fabric for more of the hip-hop show, in a corridor where black brick faces white Sheetrock. The hangings do, after all, bear black faces. They belong, though, to ordinary faces rather than celebrities, courtesy of Tyler Mitchell.

The high life and the low life

Its four opening shows exploit ICP's newfound flexibility while keeping things light, with the American crossings of "But Still, It Turns" coming up. They are just introducing a brand-new museum, and it will take time to see how the galleries hold up, with such as photographers as Diana Markosian and Gillian Laub soon to come. (Passage to classrooms and studios remains discreet.) The digital ingenuity and dystopia of James Couple may make more sense to fans of The Warriors. Otherwise, you are unlikely to find either your image or a plot in the 1979 cult film, which he has altered. Just trust him and the director, Walter Hill, that something profound is going on.

Hip-hop accords with another embarrassing piece of the action, museums devoted to pop entertainment—like Tim Burton at MoMA, David Bowie and now yasiin bey at the Brooklyn Museum, or Leonard Cohen at the Jewish Museum. Still, it is effective not just because of Gordon Parks, but also because no one celebrity stands out. It shows a more collective culture, born in the South Bronx and, as Jamal Shabazz has it, still Flying High. It also shows a collective self-fashioning, in collaboration between the musicians and such photographers as Shabazz, Joe Conzo, Jr., Janette Beckman, and Glen E. Friedman. It takes them all the way from contact sheets to album covers, magazine spreads, and a wall like a hall of fame. Who cares if it is all about style, if that is their subject?

If Tyler Mitchell extends their view of the high life, he is also its antidote. His sitters are content with anonymity and community, and his fabric wash is just hanging out to dry. Yet he also hopes for a whole new world, a "black utopia." After the fabric comes a room empty but for soft music and a white fence along the walls, like the idyllic backyard that urban dwellers will never know. As he puts it, "I often think about what white fun looks like." Still, he can never leave behind his forebodings, not even in the most serene of portrait photos—where heads are bent, women embrace for comfort, and a young man face down the ground holds his hands behind his back as if the handcuffs will never come off.

"The Lower East Side" is an escape, too, if only a tentative one. This is not the glamour and conflict on view out those glorious windows. It is not even what preceded that, in the Latinos that held on after East Village art had displaced poverty further north. It pays tribute to a deeper past and to ICP itself, in photos from the collection. It has implications for the place of immigration in America today. It also shows that, well before Diane Arbus, photography and photojournalism could be raunchy and in your face.

It also shows a shifting neighborhood and shifting uses of photography, from the 1880s to 1950s. It opens with a name associated more with muckraking than photography, Jacob Riis, whose How the Other Half Lives appeared in Scribner's magazine in 1889. One can see his agenda in a coal cellar—or hear it loud and clear in a title like The Children's Only Playground. While Riis also photographed a sabbath eve, it took a new century to focus on immigrant groups and their aspirations, and many behind the camera were immigrants themselves. Weegee photographs a man delivering bagels, Andreas Feininger a Jewish barbershop, Dan Weiner a pushcart, and Arnold Eagle a yeshiva during the Depression. Eagle, on behalf of the Works Progress Administration, also captures a sign for housing with (wow) white sinks and hot water.

Soon enough come the cold comforts and freak show of Sammy's bar, but also something darker still. Lee Sievan has an aching family portrait, while a newspaper announces the Nazi drive to power. Still others display a more self-conscious artistry. Bill Witt adds touches of Surrealism, in the eyes of an optometrist's shop sign or a pile of shoes. A man in a white straw hat looks up from the shadows of the el for Ilse Bing. Leaving ICP, one can only wonder at what will survive of their surroundings today.

Collecting promises

There can never be too many photos of the city, because there are so many sides to New York. "Collecting New York's Stories" paints a one-sided picture, but it delivers on its promise of stories. It displays the public face of the city, with its parks, its subways during and after their decades of graffiti, and most especially its sidewalks. It is also the busy human side of New York, from boom boxes to hip-hop, hanging out and proud of it. People gather together, pose together, and ignore one another at a bus stop, but they are never alone. Everyone has a story to tell, if not always a new one.

This has to be is about collecting stories, since the Museum of the City of New York draws entirely on its collection, but it could almost be collecting New York itself. Photos amount to just half of it, beside a room for posters, maps, and memorabilia—which makes sense given the show's subtitle, "Stuyvesant to Sid Vicious." Hey, there are no photos of Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Netherlands, who retired to his farm on the Bowery. If the photographs do not start with Stuyvesant, they do not end either with the lead vocalist and bass player for the Sex Pistols, under arrest for the murder of his girlfriend at the Chelsea Hotel. But then the show's heart is not in the headlines but in people. It documents the car bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 but not the greater tragedy of 9/11, and it pauses for Occupy Wall Street to take in the crowds and then moves on.

These are plain people, like elderly Jews in a cafeteria for Bruce Davidson trying or refusing to smile, subway readers for Peggy Anderson, or Harlem portraits by Edmundo Morales. Jeffrey Henson Scales tracks more than five years in shadows and in mirrors at a barbershop. Sally Davies renders men and women in silhouettes and from the back. Sure, Billie Holiday and Count Basie share a studio, a television studio, with Milt Hinton—a photographer who brought jazz into the light. John and Yoko pose outside the Dakota for Allen Tannenbaum, who also took that shot of Sid Vicious for the Soho Weekly News. Do not come here, though, expecting a celebrity city.

Do not come either for a history of the medium. The show has a quick aside for Helen Levitt, Aaron Siskind, and James Van Der Zee, but no more. It has Times Square in the days of porn shops, but not by Diane Arbus. It has workers on a high beam—but not that indelible image of lunch during construction of Rockefeller Center. It has nothing at all by Berenice Abbott, Garry Windogrand, and more. It cares more for unfamiliar faces, on both sides of the camera.

The museum is collecting stories more than photos, which is not to say that the latter are negligible. As with Scales and Davies, it has its moments of sheer darkness and light. Roy Mortenson brings Manhattan landmarks and towers close to abstraction, while Barbara Mensch contemplates East River crossings and reflections in a mist. After that, though, the show gets right back to its crowded sidewalks and demanding people. It sees one unfolding pageant—from Harlem for Van Der Zee in the 1920s to the Lower East Side for Harvey Wang in the 1980s to Queens in black and white for Mitchell Hartman today. Nothing but hair styles might seem to have changed.

The Museum of the City of New York has a habit of papering over disruptions in the city. It may well see that as its mission. Memory has a way of doing the same—that and a wish to escape gentrification, inequality, high prices, the Hudson Yards, museum expansions, and architecture today. New York may have had its crime waves and the verge of bankruptcy, but some of us were young then, feeling only the possibilities. Women in t-shirts reading The Misfits, in a photograph by Robert Herman, mean those words not as a lament but a boast. John Fekner captures a sign in protest against Broken Promises, but then New York will always have its broken promises, because it promises so much.

jhaber@haberarts.com

The International Center of Photography on Essex Street opened January 25, 2020, with shows through May 19 and, for Tyler Mitchell, December 31. "Collecting New York's Stories" ran at the Museum of the City of New York through December 31. A related review returns to Tyler Mitchell as the museum reopens after the lockdown and "ICP at 50."