Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art

Too often the International Center of Photography, located catty-corner from the main branch of the New York Public Library, gets overshadowed by the city's major museums, which also have extensive holdings in photography. That's sad and all, but having a multitude of museums from which to choose isn't a bad problem to have, from our perspective.

Anyway, right now the ICP has an exhibition of work by contemporary artists that explores the idea of "archive" in order to arrive at some deeper truth(s) about memory and identity and time and history. You might be wondering why the museum would mount a special exhibit of something photography does by its very nature: every photograph, contemporary or not, professional or not, always provides some commentary on memory and identity and time and history. Obviously there's nothing wrong with devoting space to highlighting something the medium does extremely well; we only wish the ICP had alluded to this fact somehow, rather than occluding the exhibition's various captions in layers of academic-speak.

The exhibition includes a series of family snapshots purchased by Tacita Dean at various flea markets (Floh), eerily removed from their context and blown up; images coupled with brief descriptions of victims of gunshot wounds during a one-week period in 1989 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Untitled [Death by Gunshot]), printed on large sheets of paper and available to take home as a souvenir; a powerful display of the front page of newspapers from around the world on September 12, 2001, by Hans-Peter Feldmann (9/12 Front Page), the first time this work has been shown in one place; and a really neat group of fake photographs of a fictitious lesbian actor from the 1930s (The Fae Richards Archive), complete with gently aged typewritten labels, purportedly discovered in a basement by Zoe Leonard.