New work at ICP
ICP’s Winter/Spring line up: Paris when it sizzles, when it fizzles and the all-American beefcake.
It’s been over a year of fashion photography at the International Center of Photography, but starting tomorrow a fresh batch of exhibitions will call ICP their home, at least until May. But just as last year’s rotating collections of fashion photos came with a guaranteed audience, this next lineup indicates that ICP is playing it safe, yet again, with archival Parisian photography and mostly stylish, mostly good-looking 50s-era men and women, with some modern architecture thrown in for balance.
Eugene Atget’s photos of Paris in the 1920s were inspirational at the time, but looking back now they don’t seem much different than any images you’d see in a swap meet dime-for-twenty postcard bin. Then there’s the collection of surrealist ephemera of Paris in the 20s and 30s. Think Man Ray, photo collage, blown up negatives and all the pictures of the Eiffel Tower you can stomach. The collection of Miroslav Tichy’s work is slightly more interesting, the intentionally out-of-focus images turn to women instead of landmarks, but unfortunately Tichy’s private life and his makeshift, cardboard cameras are more interesting than the work they produced. That puts a lot of pressure on Alan B. Stone, whose photos are hands down the strongest in the room. Still, it’s nothing you wouldn’t see flipping through any old issue of LIFE, and it’s hard to take his stark black and white photos of cityscapes and bleak factories seriously when they’re side by side with his more well-known shots of beefcakes and male pin-ups.
