International Center of Photography

Listen for a moment before you go inside. Delancey Street hums with traffic heading to and from the Williamsburg Bridge. Trains rumble somewhere below your feet. Near the entrance, the air smells of coffee, bread and the mix of foods from the market nearby. This corner of the Lower East Side is loud, layered and always moving. That is a fitting setting for a museum about photography, an art that began by freezing exactly this kind of motion.

You are standing at the International Center of Photography, usually shortened to ICP. It is a museum, a school and an archive under one roof. Its building here is part of Essex Crossing, a large modern development that rose on land that stayed empty for decades after the old tenements were cleared. The museum moved into this space in early 2020. If the glass and clean lines feel new, that is because they are. The institution behind them, though, is older.

The story begins with two brothers from Budapest. Robert Capa became one of the most famous war photographers of the twentieth century. He covered the Spanish Civil War and landed with American troops on D-Day in Normandy. He died in 1954 while photographing the war in Indochina. His younger brother, Cornell Capa, was also a photographer. He worked for Life magazine, the weekly picture magazine that shaped how many Americans saw the world.

After Robert's death, Cornell worried about something simple and serious. Photographs by working photojournalists were scattered, fragile and often lost. Magazines threw away prints. Negatives sat in boxes and decayed. Cornell began to speak about the concerned photographer, a person who uses the camera to document human life and to push for understanding. In 1974 he founded ICP to protect that kind of work and to teach it to new generations.

Here is the first surprise for many visitors. ICP did not start in a gritty downtown space like this one. Its first home was an elegant mansion on Fifth Avenue, far uptown on Museum Mile, close to Central Park. Later it moved to Midtown, near the theatres and offices around Times Square. It spent a short time on the Bowery. Only then did it settle here on the Lower East Side. The museum has changed addresses several times, but the mission has stayed the same.

That move downtown carries a special meaning. These streets are where American documentary photography found one of its early subjects. In the late nineteenth century, the reformer Jacob Riis photographed crowded tenements in this neighbourhood. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, showed middle-class readers rooms where whole families slept in the dark. Many historians see that work as an early example of the camera used for social change, the same idea Cornell Capa later championed.

Inside, the exhibitions change regularly, so what you see today depends on the season. You might find classic black and white photojournalism in one gallery and video or digital work in the next. ICP is interested in the whole life of an image, from the darkroom print to the picture on a phone screen. Take your time with the wall texts. They often explain how a picture was made, published and used, not only what it shows.

The second surprise sits in the archive. ICP holds a large collection of work by Weegee, the nickname of Arthur Fellig. In the 1930s and 1940s he chased crime scenes, fires and late-night drama across New York, often arriving before the police. His flash photographs are harsh, funny and sad at the same time. Much of his material came to ICP after his death, and it remains one of the most important parts of the collection.

Then there is the Mexican Suitcase, one of the strangest stories in photography. During the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa, his partner Gerda Taro and their colleague David Seymour, known as Chim, shot thousands of negatives. The negatives disappeared during the chaos of war and were feared lost. Decades later they turned up in Mexico City, packed in small boxes. In 2007 they came to ICP, which now cares for them. Pictures that were missing for about seventy years could finally be studied again.

Remember that ICP is also a school. Students come here to learn photography in classes and longer programmes. On some days you may see people carrying camera bags, portfolios or film rolls through the lobby. This mix of learners and visitors gives the building a working feel. It is not only a place to look at photographs. It is also a place where new ones are made, critiqued and argued about.

Notice how the galleries handle light. Photographs are sensitive to it, and many older prints can fade with too much exposure. So the rooms are often calm and evenly lit, with no harsh sun falling on the walls. Your eyes adjust after a minute. Faces in the pictures seem to come forward. Stand back from a large print, and then step in close. Small details, like a reflection in a window or a hand at the edge of a frame, often tell the real story.

When you leave, the neighbourhood itself becomes a gallery. Just nearby is Essex Market, a public food market that has served this area for generations, now in a modern hall. Walk a few blocks and you reach old tenement buildings with fire escapes zigzagging down their fronts. Signs in several languages, small shops and newer restaurants sit side by side. Every street corner here has been photographed thousands of times, and still looks different in each picture.

Think about what Cornell Capa wanted to protect. Not only famous images, but the habit of looking closely at ordinary lives. Many of the photographs inside show people who never expected anyone to remember them. A vendor, a child on a stoop, a soldier in a trench. The museum keeps their faces in the record. That is a quiet but powerful idea, and it works best if you carry it with you outside.

So before you walk on, pause at the door. Look at Delancey Street the way a photographer would. Watch where the light falls on the brick, how people cross against the signal, how a bus frames a face in its window. You do not need a camera to do this. You only need attention. That attention is what this place has tried to teach since 1974... and the street in front of you is ready for it.