There’s an intriguing trio of exhibits at the International Center of Photography.
Unknown Weegee, about 100 seldom-seen photos from the master New York City tabloid shutterbug, runs the range of high and low society. His images of minor celebrities and “normal” people at functions, dances and in public still have an Arbus-like creepiness, as in one of my favorites, a woman reclining languidly in a car and signing autographs for the boys crowded outside her window.
Then there’s Weegee’s usual special blend of Bowery drunks, strippers, bums, Coney Island disasters and murder victims. If this guy isn’t the patron saint of the New York Post, I don’t know who would be, particularly with his championing of the “If it bleeds, it leads” tabloid philosophy (on display is a $35 receipt to Weegee from Time for “Two Murders”) and his rampant editorializing. One photo of a jailbird is captioned in Weegee’s hand as “Behind Bars . . . for Being a Dope.” Others seem to have been captioned out of context, like the couple making out awkwardly while wearing what appear to be hand-crafted space helmets, above Weegee’s phrase, “Boy meets girl—from Mars.” My laugh out loud moment came courtesy of the photo of a poster from the early ’50s, with an illustration of a stern nurse accosting the viewer, and the command, “Protect the genetic future of your country: Give generously to your local sperm bank.”
Another exhibit of about 40 images downstairs, Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, serves as a fine companion piece to the Museum of Modern Art’s Dada exhibit. Made from the mid-’20s to the early ’30s from newspaper clippings and original photos pasted to board, Brandt’s collages have a pleasing symmetry and a strange cohesiveness considering the breadth of her source material. In a few pieces, you can still see lines and arcs penciled to the board where she considered the exact placement of each puzzle-piece-like element of the whole.
The gallery upstairs is reserved for a few giant, crisp prints by Korean contemporary artist Atta Kim. Strange stuff. A curious series of photos, Monologue of Ice, Portrait of Mao, depicts an ice bust of Mao melting in stages, with a fourth photo depicting 108 glasses of water placed precisely on steel and glass shelving. Concerned with time and movement, he digitally superimposes many takes of his portraits with varying degrees of transparency, so the final image of the individual is overlapped to the point of seeming three-dimensional or resembling those lenticular images that you tilt to change. Kim also favors photos made with extremely long exposures, eight hours in some cases. Much too long to register movement, this timing gives his landscapes a ghostly quality, devoid of people and vehicles, whether they’re of the surprisingly lush Korean DMZ or busy intersections of New York at dawn.
