When the International Center of Photography launched Strangers, its first Triennial, in 2003, its curators wrote that their goal was "to demonstrate photography's incomparable richness as a visual medium--in the form of still photographs, video, sculptural objects, and installation pieces. The result is a dynamic coherence that results as much from a dialogue between individual works as from curatorial intention." This second time out, in a period of rampant natural disasters and concerns about global environmental change, they have shifted their attention from strangers, from our relationships with one another, to home, to our relationships with the earth. Ecotopia, brings readers the natural world through the eyes and lenses of some of the most interesting and engaging photographers working today. These 30 international artists shatter stereotypes of landscape and nature imagery to examine new concepts of the natural sphere occasioned by twenty-first-century technologies. They capture our destructive engagement with the environment and develop visions of our future, both better and worse. Ecotopia considers nature in the broadest sense, and offers new perspectives on the planet that sustains, enchants and, increasingly, frightens.

Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Steidl/International Center of Photography

This is the most comprehensive look to date at the work of Atta Kim, one of Korea's most distinctive contemporary artists. Born in 1956, Kim uses photography to create dramatic, large-scale works that reflect his fascination with philosophical questions. The "Deconstruction Series" (1992-95) features disconcerting images of seemingly lifeless men and women whose naked bodies are scattered like seeds in open fields and desolate natural settings. In the "Museum Project" (1995-2002), Kim poses people drawn from a wide range of social types in clear acrylic boxes lit like museum vitrines and placed in a variety of urban and natural locations. These images of what he ironically calls "contemporary treasures" provide an unusual perspective on contemporary approaches to sexuality, materialism, politics and religion. For the large-scale, visually spectacular color photographs of the "On-Air Project" (2002 to the present), Kim employed extended exposures--sometimes as long as eight hours--to explore fundamental questions of time and perception. Using such varied subjects as parliamentary sessions, soccer games, outdoor military exercises and erotic unions, he suggests the ephemerality of human existence, and that it is possible for us to perceive the passage of time in radically different ways. Atta Kim includes a career-spanning interview with the artist by ICP curator Christopher Phillips.

Atta Kim

Individual Artists

The viewing public's image of Weegee is of the prototypical New York tabloid news photographer: tough, garrulous and on the scene, ready to cover two murders in one night. But the inventive Jewish immigrant Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), who assumed the self-mocking nickname Weegee, was also one of the most original and creative photographers of the twentieth century. His work for The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, World-Telegram, Daily News, Post, Journal-American and Sun, his images of the masses at Coney Island, the confrontation of wealth and poverty at opening night at the opera, and the aftermath of brutal crime scenes are, by now, classics. But beyond the iconic images that have been so widely circulated, what do we know of Weegee the photographer--his history, his methods, his meaning? Drawing on ICP's unique archive of nearly 20,000 prints by this celebrated master, Unknown Weegee presents 120 photographs that have never been made available to the public. They reveal a politically astute and witty social critic and attest to the seriousness and self-consciousness of his photographic endeavors. With essays by Luc Sante and ICP curator Cynthia Young.

Unknown Weegee

Arthur 'Weegee' Fellig

Luc Sante

Cynthia Young

Amelia Earhart remains nearly as famous today as she was in 1937, the year her plane disappeared over the Pacific. What roles did photography and the media play in constructing her iconography? In an era when aviators were glamorous symbols of adventure and modernity, she launched herself into instant celebrity by becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, her celebrity aided considerably by the flight promoter and publisher George Palmer Putnam, whom she later married. For nearly 10 years, from the late 20s to the late 30s, newspapers and magazines profiled Earhart's record-breaking flights, her forays into clothing designs and her endorsements for everything from cigarettes to luggage. Earhart, in turn, capitalized on the fame that her accomplishments brought her to champion the advancement of women and other causes about which she was passionate. In her unconventional pants and leather jacket, she became the embodiment of the new roles that began to seem possible for American women in the 1920s and 30s. Through magazines, newspapers, original press photos and advertisements, Image and Icon, published on the occasion of the exhibition at New York's International Center of Photography, traces the construction of Earhart's iconic image and its continued resonance today.

Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon

Lubben, Kristen

Butler, Sue

Presenting the works of 50 contemporary artists and photographers from around the world, Strangers explores the different roles the camera now plays in negotiating the boundaries between public and private life, trust and fear, intimacy and isolation. Accompanying the first recurring exhibition of its kind devoted to photography and related media at the International Center of Photography in New York, Strangers investigates the social world through images that have been created as a result of encounters with people unknown to one another. In addition to the more personal and psychological aspects of estrangement, the artists in Strangers also engage with the theme of globalization and diaspora--an especially timely subject in its geopolitical ramifications. Strangers includes illuminating biographical essays on each of the artists and their works; four original essays by ICP curators Brian Wallis, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers and Edward Earle that explore the ever-evolving and prescient theme of strangers; and approximately 200 images generated in a variety of media from traditional and digital processes to multimedia installations and video. Artists represented include Olivio Barbieri, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Luc Delahaye, Rineke Dijkstra, David Goldblatt, Bill Henson, Susan Meiselas, Shirin Neshat, John Schabel and Joel Sternfeld, among others.

STRANGERS: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

Phillips, Christopher

Wallis, Brian

DiCorcia, Philip-Lorca

Henson, Bill

Neshat, Shirin

In her most recent body of work, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas pieces together verbal and visual traces of encounters with the Dani--an indigenous people of the West Papuan highlands--from the nearly six decades since their "discovery" by the West. In this subjective, fragmentary history, Meiselas draws from the experiences of missionaries, colonists, anthropologists and modern-day ecotourists, all of whom have come to the Dani's Baliem Valley and transformed the conditions under which they live. The ambiguous relations between power and representation--whether in the form of Dutch colonial patrol notes from the 1930s, the sensationalized media accounts of the survivors of a downed U.S. army plane in "Shangri-La" from the 1940s or a tourist's snapshots from the 1990s--become visible in Meiselas's book, through both the contradictions and unexpected continuities of the gathered materials.

Encounters With the Dani

Between the Public and the Private is the first English-language publication to address the work of the pioneering Constructivist artist, designer, photographer and photomontagist Gustav Klutsis. Unlike the work of fellow members of the Soviet avant garde, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, Klutsis's extensive and innovative output has remained relatively unexplored. This catalogue also presents the groundbreaking but largely unknown work of Valentina Kulagina, Klutsis's wife and colleague, and explores the creative partnership that existed between the two artists. In addition to a scholarly text by curator Margarita Tupitsyn, a leading scholar of Russian art and photography who has had access to the artists' family archives, Between the Public and the Private presents, for the first time in any language, translated excerpts from Klutsis's letters and Kulagina's diaries, offering new insight on the artists and the political and cultural climate in which they were working.

Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage after Constructivism

Klutsis, Gustav

Kulagina, Valentina

TUPITSYN, MARGARITA

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Steidl/International Center of Photography publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Steidl/International Center of Photography