“Your Mirror: Portraits” Exhibition

International Center of Photography

This event has ended.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) presents its Winter/Spring 2019 exhibitions: For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? and Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection. Both are on view from February 8 through April 28, 2019. The institution is slated to reunite its Museum and School at Essex Crossing on New York’s Lower East Side in fall 2019.

Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection—surveys the nuanced ways people present themselves for the camera, how and by whom they are represented, and who is deemed worthy of commemoration. Featuring a range of images including studio portraits, snapshots, and documentary photographs—all drawn from the ICP Collection—this exhibit features a daguerreotype of a bedridden woman by Southworth & Hawes, a cart-de-visite featuring Sojourner Truth holding her knitting, Samuel Fosso’s performative self-portraits, as well as an FBI wanted poster.

“We live in a hyper-photographic culture, where we are creating and capturing images of ourselves and others at a rapid pace,” says Erin Barnett, ICP’s director of exhibitions and collections. “With Your Mirror, which explores the historic context of portraiture, we aim to gain understanding of the ways in which people made—or didn’t make—decisions about how they were presented for the camera and for society. There couldn’t be a more important time to examine the ways in which photography shapes our ideas about others and ourselves.”