haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Think keeping up with the news is hard? What about keeping up with the streets?

With “We Are Here,” the International Center of Photography exhibits “scenes from the streets,” through January 6, and its title is an assertion. It speaks for the show’s subjects, in sixteen countries, asserting their presence and demanding a voice. It speaks to the pace of the streets and the very nature of photography, snapping away as best it can. We are here, it says, and soon we will be gone. What, though, will anyone remember? And what has happened to photography’s decisive moment?

Of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson coined “the decisive moment” to describe a vision of the present that not all photographers share—and I work this together with past reviews of Mark Steinmetz, Hans Breder, and Cartier-Bresson’s ideal as a longer review and my latest upload. Fashion photography or product photography needs time to create an image and to land a sale. Abstract photography asks to step out of time, even when it provides a window onto the photographer at work. From ICP’s founding, though, fifty years ago, it made photojournalism not a choice but a responsibility. It was not just keeping up with the news but making news. Lives were at stake.

Street photography can seem a casualty—or a foster child of silence and very fast time. You know what to expect at ICP, a city in motion. Look back to New York in the 1970s with Martha Cooper, when crime was at its peak, for empty lots and kids climbing the fences, if not the walls. Just crossing Canal Street with so many others is enough for Corky Lee. Skip ahead to the present, and collective motion means protest—for Freddie Gray in Baltimore with Devin Allen or for Women’s Day in Mexico City with Yolanda Andrade. Rest assured that the riot squad will turn up in force, even when no riot is going on.

Look for symbols, like the American flag put to personal use. Look for protest signs and graffiti, like spray paint that rechristens the American West for Nicholas Galanin as No Name Creek and Indian Land. Look for Palestinians on a day at the beach, Ferris wheels, kids doing cartwheels, or everyone just hanging out. Look for displays of street fashion, one girl or woman at a time. Look for them all again and again. The thirty-odd photographers get several shots apiece to do them justice. Most are contemporary and barely known.

The trouble is that you very much can expect them, over and over. Nothing seems all that decisive. As one protest sign has it, for Vanessa Charlot, the people demand “full humanity.” Actual humans, though, can get forgotten along the way, as older street photographers like Ming Smith and William Klein would never have allowed. The photographs do not want to make isolated, iconic images, which is exhilarating. Something, though, is lost—be it the issues at stake in protest, the poignancy of outcomes, or photography’s experiments.

There are things worth remembering nonetheless, on top of the sheer weight of the familiar. Street lives matter. While many stick to black and white, a tribute to street photography’s past, color can tell a story, too. It can erupt in umbrellas for Janette Beckman or women together, in South Africa for Trevor Stuurman or and in China for Feg Li. They are not just showing off but being themselves. Smugglers cycle or cart their bright bundles for Romuald Hazoumè, and yellow caps make police no less dangerous for Lam Yik Fei.

Is a riot going on after all—a riot of color in the riot of the streets? Chastening to a critic, even the breaks in uniformity come more than once. I had admired Anthony Hernandez before for LA seen through a chain-link fence, but here the distancing comes again with Michael Wolf. Long exposures from Alexey Titarenko turn St. Petersburg into a city of ghosts. And then women in white at church in Nigeria for Stephen Tayo could be an extraterrestrial delegation for peace. This, too, is the street.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Yto Barrada photographed Gibraltar, near her African home town, as a touch point for North Africans in the treacherous passage to safety. She embraced it, too, for the sun and sea.

YThat was 1999, but even now she is traditional enough to work not digitally, but in the darkroom. At the International Center of Photography, you may wonder if she ever leaves its confines, even with a camera. She prefers photograms, of candy wrappers and child’s toys, as a cavalcade of overlapping colors and blocks of light. Sweet.

You may not think of Barrada as a photographer, but she began as one. She graduated from the one-year programs at ICP in 1996—then in a Fifth Avenue mansion that could have converted anyone to the medium. Now she returns home several times over. She was back in the darkroom ten years ago, on her return to New York, and she has a solo show at her old school of the results, while recent graduates of those programs share their work a floor above. It may not define her once and for all, but it helps broaden the museum’s self-definition. She may never become a full-time photographer, but she is, as the show has it, “Part-Time Abstractionist,” through September 2.

Actually Barrada has had several homes and successive media. Born in Paris to Moroccan parents in 1971, she spend much of her childhood in Tangier, studied at the Sorbonne, and co-founded a cinema art house in Tangier as well. She exhibited at the LMCC Art Center on Governors Island in 2020, with Bettina Grossman (or simply Bettina) as her guest. Her work there included sculpture, installation, and abstract art (and I leave you to my review then for more). Now she brings a long overdue touch of color to the barren, pebbled courtyard of MoMA PS1. The piled cubes of Le Grand Soir look like attempts at grand pyramids that never quite made it—or just long overdue seating.

ICP displays sculpture and video, too, in a small show curated by Elisabeth Sherman. A makeshift vase holds cardboard flowers, while the video takes her from the darkroom to an arid but tempting suburban landscape. Cars with what might be a hearse at its front pass homes whose only face rotates open and shut, like an oversize garage door. The procession reaches a traffic circle without heeding the temptation to turn, on its way to what must remain unseen and unknown. As the cars pass, red and white striped curbs swell into red along the pavement, and palm trees sink into the ground and rise once more. They, too, are part-time abstraction.

Are they playful in tone, formal exercises, or deeply allusive—much as the houses might pass for toys, Minimalist sculpture, or the American southwest? Do they belong at all at ICP? Whatever your answer, do not be too sure. The year’s celebration of “ICP at 50” recalled its founding mission, to promote photojournalism and a concern for humanity. Barrada earned her certificate in documentary photography as well. Yet ICP’s anniversary show also saw a broadening as far as abstraction, and so does she.

Barrada does not need a camera to approach the heights of abstraction. She relishes darkroom tools, like dodge and burn, and rescues paper from the trash. A sewing machine without thread punches its way through more paper, leaving first vertical and horizontal axes, then parallel lines between them. By the time she is done, she has a near textbook reproduction of a black painting by Frank Stella. In the one series with a camera, plumbing supplies from Tangier look like actors in a silent comedy. Take it seriously, but keep smiling.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.