Forty ways of looking at a stranger: in its first Triennial exhibition, the International Center of Photography brought together work by 40 photographers, all of it dealing in some fashion with what it means to be a stranger - Photography

The international Center of Photography's decision to organize its first Triennial of Photography and Video around the theme "Strangers" was a small blow of genius--or at least the photographs and videos included made it strike one as being so. Disparate but consistently intelligent and engrossing, the work shared a take domicile message that being a stranger--as oppos to, say, an Other--is an everyday, lowercase thing, remarkable mainly for the commomnes of the experience. And also, of course, for its strangeness. ICP senior curator Christopher Phillips, single of the Triennial's four organizers, says the theme was arrived at in the summer of 2001 when they" "realized a for the use of all thread was artists engaging with somebodys unknown to them." Holding onto this thread, he says, allowed the curators to examine the boundaries of personal comfort in the world today. before long circumstances over took them. A wall true copy explains that 'after the incidents of Sept. 11, 2001, "the issue of fear and trust among clan in public space seemed unavoidable." Sometimes, as Phillips points on the outside what artists do is uncannily anticipatory.

The wall true copy also mentioned a "recognition of the novel revival of urban street photography." Co organizer Carol Squiers notes the ICP's original focus upon documentary photography and photojournalism, and says that the Triennial curatorial team, which also included Edward Earle and the center's chief curator, Brian Wallis, wanted to examine the influence of that tradition upon current art practice. Squiers adheres to a clear distinction between photojournalism and art--they involve "different preoccupations and different freedoms," she contends--and says the team's attention was drawn to journalistic way photography's art outcome. Describing the exhibition this way is a little deceptive: it was not a showcase for latter-day Cartier-Bressons or Robert Franks, and indeed there was a smattering of controls that are wholly or partly fictional. on the other hand the exhibition did maintain an emphasis upon anonymous citizens of the real world.

In doing for a like reason it neatly sidestepped many of the photographers now best known to the art public, from Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth to Cindy Sherman and Mariko Mori. It may draw near as a surprise that by dint of eliminating family and friends (away move Tina Barney, Nan Goldin) and, greatest in quantity resolutely, self portraiture, huge chunk of the reputedly mass-media-attuned photo-image world fall away.

Also downplayed in this inaugural Triennial were those woozy images of stifling teenage girls that in new years have been nearly ubiquitous. Nor did the curators find a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of use for recently favored technical mannerisms: there was real little blurring or dimming or other forms of visual impoverishment, and digital morphing and erasure were generally avoided. Indeed, there was almost nothing upon the fallibility of photography, which is, after all, a farm of (medium-specific) self-regard. And allowing all these omissions defined the exhibition's bring under rule in negative terms, they also constituted a actual refreshing reprieve.

That is not to say that there were no familiar names among the 40 photographers chosen who together show 20 countries. For instance, Rineke Dijkstra (the Netherlands), well-known balladeer of teenage angst, was showed by a suite of photographs that glimpse, at two-year intervals, a newly emigrated Bosnian girl named Almerisa becoming a ripe Dutch woman. Complicating ground lordships established in familiar projects by the agency of Nicholas Nixon and Michael Apted (among others), Dijkstra present to views Almerisa becoming an adult not just visibly les alienated from the photographer on the other hand also progressively more comfortable with her adopted homeland and (it seems) herself. Together, Dijsktra's Almerisa photographs neatly captured the exhibition's sum of two units main avenues of exploration, the individual directed inward to a psychological experience of estrangement, the other outward toward a social condition.

The equally well-exposed Justine Kurland (US) broke away Acre from the bad-girl picture pack in a serial documentation of rural speaks With this series she traces the figure of the "stranger," generally treated in the Triennial as all urbanite and plane as a defining character of urbanism, back to the American heartland. These communes' self-affiliated families of men and women oldster and babies, are absurdly, touchingly mismatched; frequently co-residents don't even seem to bc sharing a season (as when a certain quantity of subjects are naked, while others in the same photo wear clothing suitable for deepest winter, or, better, a masked ball). on the other hand Kurland's images, modestly scaled and precisely detailed, treat all with equal dignity. Assuming rather formal attitudes, the communards for the greatest in quantity part seem tough as nails, and ofttimes far gone in forlornness, allowing a few are assembled with an organ of sight toward mythic narrative. The Fall, for instance, looks to cite a Renaissance Expulsion--Masaccio's, in particular--with its naked man and woman, small and frail in the arid, brambly landscape, walking humbly away.