Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich @ ICP, NYC - International Center of Photography

Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich

International Center of Photography, New York

Through January 8, 2024

William Walling, Jr. 

[Portrait of Marlene Dietrich], 1932 

Collection Pierre Passebon

Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich, on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP), examines the multifaceted evolution of Dietrich’s public persona with 250 photographs made between 1905 and 1978. The exhibition provides a window into Marlene Dietrich’s complex and intrepid life as well as the rapid transformations in the entertainment industry – from silent film to television – in which she thrived, cementing a legacy as one of the 20th century’s most dynamic and iconic artists. 

Play the Part offers insight into Marlene Dietrich’s mastery of her own image in the era of studio-dominated movie making and distribution in Hollywood—a system that dissolved in the 1960s, drastically shifting the centers of power in the industry. Among the images on view are studio-commissioned publicity portraits, identifiable by the appearance of Marlene Dietrich's autograph, often in her distinctive green ink. The exhibition showcases captivating works by Hollywood photographers such as George Hurrell, Eugene Robert Richee, and William Walling Jr., alongside iconic photographs by renowned artists including Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Alfred Eisenstadt, Horst P. Horst, Lee Miller, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen. Play the Part, drawn from the Pierre Passebon Collection and on view in the U.S. for the first time, also highlights film stills, set pictures, and other candid photographs, many of which are unpublished and rarely seen. 

Born in Berlin, Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was a performer renowned for her starring roles in films such as The Blue Angel (1930), the first feature-length German talkie, and her foundational partnership with filmmaker Josef von Sternberg. In 1930, opposing the ascending Nazi regime, she emigrated to the United States, ultimately renouncing her German citizenship. During World War II, she actively supported US troops, donated funds to refugees, and toured with the USO. In recognition of her efforts, she became the first woman to be awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1947. In the 1950s, she transitioned primarily to live performances, captivating audiences in theaters worldwide. Her final film appearance was in Just a Gigolo (1979), after which she withdrew from performing and public life. 

Marlene Dietrich's infatuation with photography and creating her own image blossomed at the start of her career. In 1964 she told an interviewer, “I had no desire to be a film actress, to always play somebody else, to be always beautiful...” She utilized camera angles, lighting, makeup, and editing to perfect her appearance, adapting her techniques as she aged and as photo technology advanced. This control, combined with her daring fashion choices and uninhibited sexual expression, crafted a public persona of an auteur with unwavering self-assurance. Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich showcases Dietrich's remarkable ability to reinvent herself for each new audience, staying atop her chosen field throughout.  

“ICP is delighted to present Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich, including hundreds of striking and rarely seen images of one of the 20th century's most boundary breaking and captivating personas,” said David E. Little, ICP’s Executive Director. “It has been a joy to collaborate with passionate collector Pierre Passebon, who has used his extraordinary eye to assemble an utterly unique and engaging collection of photographs of Dietrich. Pierre’s collection reveals the complexities of Marlene Dietrich’s many images and guises. The exhibition invites audiences to explore Dietrich’s multifaceted relationship to photography and its enduring power to shape society’s understanding of culture.”  

Dietrich played many parts throughout her life, both on and off the screen: seductress, matriarch, war hero, socialite. Each of these roles is a testament to her understanding of and adaptability to the industry she worked within. The roles also reveal Marlene Dietrich’s relentless obsession with the medium of photography. 

This exhibition is curated by Haley Kane, Exhibitions and Collections Coordinator at ICP. 

ICP - INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

79 Essex Street, New York, NY 10002

www.icp.org

Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich - ICP - September 29, 2023 – January 8, 2024 

Weegee: At the Movies! Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, NYC

Weegee: At the Movies! 

Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, NYC 

Through June 14, 2015 

WEEGEE, [Girls laughing at movie, New York], ca. 1943. 

with infrared film

© Weegee/ International Center of Photography.

Fourteen images by Weegee—best known for his tabloid photographs of New York City’s crime scenes, urban crowds, and nightlife in the 1930s and ’40s—are on display on the second floor of the Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas  (260 West 23rd Street) to celebrate the theater’s reopening. The photographs are part of a series Weegee made in New York City theaters in the mid-1940s with infrared film.

From bemused children to entwined couples, lonely sleepers to exhilarated teenage girls, this gallery of portraits constitutes a powerful, unique, and moving tribute to cinema lovers. The passion conveyed in these images—their lyricism, magic, and poetry— remind us of the quintessential role played by the arts, and specifically still and moving images, in our society.

The photographs exhibited here are part of the Weegee archive, representing the largest holding of this master photographer’s work, which is housed at the International Center of Photography. The archive containing nearly 20,000 prints, negatives, tear sheets, manuscript drafts, correspondence, and other personal memorabilia.

Weegee: Biography 

Weegee was born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899, in the town of Lemburg (now in Ukraine). He first worked as a photographer at age fourteen, three years after his family immigrated to the United States, where his first name was changed to the more American-sounding Arthur. Self-taught, he held many other photographyrelated jobs before gaining regular employment at a photography studio in lower Manhattan in 1918. This job led him to others at a variety of newspapers until, in 1935, he became a freelance news photographer. 

He centered his practice around police headquarters, and in 1938 he obtained permission to install a police radio in his car. This allowed him to take the first and most sensational photographs of news events and offer them for sale to publications such as the Herald-Tribune, Daily News, Post, the Sun, and PM Weekly, among others.

During the 1940s, Weegee’s photographs appeared outside the mainstream press and met success there as well. New York’s Photo League held an exhibition of his work in 1941, and the Museum of Modern Art began collecting his work and exhibited it in 1943. Weegee published his photographs in several books, including Naked City (1945), Weegee’s People (1946), and Naked Hollywood (1953). After moving to Hollywood in 1947, he devoted most of his energy to making 16-millimeter films and photographs for his “Distortions” series, a project that resulted in experimental portraits of celebrities and political figures. He returned to New York in 1952 and lectured and wrote about photography until his death on December 27, 1968.

Weegee’s photographic oeuvre is unusual in that it was successful in the popular media and respected by the fine-art community during his lifetime. His photographs’ ability to navigate between these two realms comes from the strong emotional connection forged between the viewer and the characters in his photographs, as well as from Weegee’s skill at choosing the most telling and significant moments of the events he photographed. ICP’s retrospective exhibition of his work in 1998 attested to Weegee’s continued popularity; his work is frequently recollected or represented in contemporary television, film, and other forms of popular entertainment.

About Bow Tie Cinemas, New York

Founded by B.S. Moss in 1900, four generations of family ownership have guided Bow Tie Cinemas from its origins in Vaudeville to its current holdings of fifty-five theaters in the eastern United States. 2015 marks the 115th anniversary of Bow Tie Cinemas and the completed renovation of its flagship Chelsea Cinemas in Manhattan. In addition to a permanent photography exhibit curated by The International Center of Photography, the all-new Chelsea Cinemas’ upgrades will include: luxury seating and reserved seating, a new lobby and interior box office, concession stands and enhanced food offerings.

About ICP, New York

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is the world’s leading institution dedicated to the practice and understanding of photography and the reproduced image in all its forms. Through our exhibitions, educational programs, and community outreach, we offer an open forum for dialogue about the role images play in our culture. Since our founding, we have presented more than 700 exhibitions and offered thousands of classes, providing instruction at every level. ICP is a center where photographers and artists, students and scholars can create and interpret the world of the image within our comprehensive educational and archival facilities. Visit www.icp.org for more information.

A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial 2013, International Center of Photography, NYC

A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial 2013, International Center of Photography, New York, USA
Through September 8, 2013

A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial 2013, a global survey of contemporary photography and video, is on view at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, NYC) since May 17 through September 8, 2013. Filling ICP’s entire gallery space as well as its exterior windows, the exhibition features 28 emerging and established artists from 14 countries whose works speak to and illuminate the new visual and social territory in which image making operates today. Artists include Nayland Blake, A.K. Burns, Thomas Hirschhorn, Elliott Hundley, Gideon Mendel, Wangechi Mutu, Sohei Nishino, Lisa Oppenheim, and Nica Ross. A complete list is below.

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse 

Windows, Ponte City 212.857.0045 (detail), 2008-2010. 

Photo © Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

Courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Starting from the premise that most photography is now produced, processed, and distributed in digital form, A Different Kind of Order explores the sometimes unanticipated consequences of this shift as revealed in the work of a wide range of international artists. For the younger artists in the Triennial, the digital revolution is something that happened during their childhood, and dealing with its ramifications has occupied most of their creative lives. For artists of this generation (such as Sam Falls, Andrea Longacre-White, and Oliver Laric), mixing the new idioms of digital imagemaking with the existing visual language of painting, sculpture, and collage is almost second nature. Other Triennial artists, wary of the advent of “screen culture,” emphasize the handmade qualities of their work, yet even they recognize that their efforts are situated within the space of a fully digitized, networked world.

“The ICP Triennial, the only recurring exhibition in the U.S. to focus on international contemporary photography and video, provides an unparalleled opportunity for visitors to encounter new works by established artists and to discover emerging artists,” said Mark Robbins, Executive Director of ICP. “A Different Kind of Order reflects our present moment of a new kind of order shaped by social, political, and technological changes.”

The exhibition sketches the contours of the new visual and social territory in which photography finds itself today. A number of key themes serve as guidelines that link the works in the exhibition:

• Artist as aggregator identifies one of the main aesthetic offshoots of the digital image environment: the present-day descendants of the “image scavengers” of the 1980s who are now busy plundering and reorganizing found, online photographs into highly personal, web-based archives.

• The resurgence of collage is evident in works that combine photographic fragments, digital images, paint, three-dimensional objects, and audio and video material to blast open and reconfigure the space of the photograph in unprecedented ways.

• At a time when all manner of power structures are being called into question, mapping has become a renewed subject of artistic inquiry—part of a wider fascination with the power of ordering systems that has emerged in response to the dematerialized disorder of the Internet’s environment.

• The Internet’s dissolution of geographic distance has spurred the development of new forms of community, allowing artists to explore new forms of connection, collaboration, and multiple authorship that do not depend on physical proximity.

• In cooperation with ICP Associate Librarian Matthew Carson, the exhibition will also include an installation of approximately 100 recent photo books, which testifies to the extraordinary boom in selfpublished and small-press photo books now occurring around the world.

A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial was organized by ICP curators Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers, and Joanna Lehan. See below for curator biographies.

ICP TRIENNIAL 2013 EXHIBITION ARTISTS

Roy Arden b. 1957, Vancouver; lives and works in Vancouver

Huma Bhabha b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan; lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York

Nayland Blake b. 1960, New York City; lives and works in New York City

A.K. Burns b. 1975, Capitola, California; lives and works in New York City

Aleksandra Domanovic b. 1981, Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia; lives and works in Berlin

Nir Evron b. 1974, Herzliya, Israel; lives and works in Tel Aviv

Sam Falls b. 1984, San Diego; lives and works in Los Angeles

Lucas Foglia b. 1983, New York City; lives and works in San Francisco

Jim Goldberg b. 1953, New Haven; lives and works in San Francisco

Mishka Henner b. 1976, Brussels; lives and works in Manchester, England

Thomas Hirschhorn b. 1957, Bern, Switzerland; lives and works in Paris

Elliott Hundley b. 1975, Greensboro, North Carolina; lives and works in Los Angeles

Oliver Laric b. 1981, Innsbruck, Austria; lives and works in Berlin

Andrea Longacre-White b. 1980, Radnor, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Los Angeles

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer b. 1967, Mexico City; lives and works in Montreal

Gideon Mendel b. 1959, Johannesburg; lives and works in London

Luis Molina-Pantin b. 1969, Geneva, Switzerland; lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela

Rabih Mroué b. 1967, Beirut; lives and works in Beirut

Wangechi Mutu b. 1972, Nairobi, Kenya; lives and works in New York City

Sohei Nishino b. 1982, Hyogo, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo

Lisa Oppenheim b. 1975, New York City; lives and works in New York City and Berlin

Trevor Paglen b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland; lives and works in New York City

Walid Raad b. 1967, Beirut; lives and works in New York City

Nica Ross b. 1983, Tempe, Arizona; lives and works in New York City

Michael Schmelling b. 1973, Pittsburgh; lives and works in New York City

Hito Steyerl b. 1966, Munich; lives and works in Berlin

Mikhael Subotzky / Patrick Waterhouse b. 1981, Cape Town, South Africa; lives and works in Johannesburg / b. 1981 Bath, England; lives and works in Italy, England, and South Africa

Shimpei Takeda b. 1982, Sukagawa, Fukushima, Japan; lives and works in New York City

ICP TRIENNIAL 2013 EXHIBITION CURATORS

Kristen Lubben, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions at ICP, has been a member of the curatorial staff since 1998. She has organized many exhibitions focusing on documentary practice, gender, and politics, including Susan Meiselas: In History, Magnum Contacts, Gerda Taro, Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, and El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers. Kristen Lubben is the author and editor of several publications, including Magnum Contact Sheets (Thames & Hudson) and the catalogue for the exhibition In History.

Christopher Phillips, ICP Curator, organizes exhibitions of historic and contemporary photography. In 2004, he and Wu Hung of the University of Chicago organized the first major U.S. exhibition of Chinese contemporary photography, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China. He has curated exhibitions including Atta Kim: On-Air (2006), Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan (2008), and Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide (2011). He is an adjunct faculty member at New York University and Barnard College, where he teaches classes in the history and criticism of photography.

Carol Squiers, ICP Curator, has organized exhibitions on a range of subjects, includ¬ing contemporary art, fashion photography, and the intersection of science, technology, and photography. She has published extensively in periodicals, books, and catalogues, and is the editor of the collections Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography (2000) and The Critical Image (1990), co-author with Vince Aletti of Avedon Fashion: 1944–2000 (2009), and author of The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness, and Healing (2005).

Joanna Lehan, Assistant Curator at ICP, co-organized Strangers: the First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video in 2003 and the second Triennial, Ecotopia, in 2006. As a book editor for Aperture Foundation, she organized monographs by artists Thomas Ruff, Susan Meiselas, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others. She has contributed essays to several photographic monographs, has served as a consultant to The Walther Collection, a private photographic collection and museum in Germany and New York, and has worked as a photo editor, researcher, and columnist.

ICP TRIENNIAL 2013 CATALOGUE

A fully illustrated catalogue, produced by ICP in partnership with DelMonico Books • Prestel, accompanies the exhibition. It includes sections dedicated to individual artists and contributions by ICP curators.

A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial, ICP/DelMonico Books • Prestel 2013, 8 x 10 inches, Hardcover; US $49.95

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, International Center of Photography, New York

Ralph Eugene Meatyard 

International Center of Photography, New York

December 10, 2004 - February 27, 2005 

The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) defy convention. They have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Fascinated by the uncanniness of ordinary life, Meatyard made mysterious staged images using his friends and family—often involving masks and abandoned spaces—that are familiar and disturbing at the same time. Highly original and deeply emotional, Meatyard’s expressionist style and use of staged scenes foreshadows the work of many contemporary artists, such as Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, and Justine Kurland. The most comprehensive exhibition of his photographs to date, Ralph Eugene Meatyard will be the first major New York City showing of this work. The selection of over 150 photographs was made by Guy Davenport, scholar, poet, and friend of the artist.

Meatyard was an optometrist by profession who shot on weekends and printed his photographs in a makeshift darkroom in his home. From his thousands of images, he would select only those he considered his best, making just one or two prints of each negative. His strict attention to technique and consistency in print size achieved the aesthetic effects of photography he was seeking — a world seen through a full tonal range from black to white; intentionally strange, yet familiar and approachable.

From 1953 until his untimely death in 1972, Ralph Eugene Meatyard explored what he called the “photographic.” His earliest work from the mid-1950s includes a documentary project on Georgetown Street, a primarily African American neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky. He then began an experiment that continued off and on throughout the 1960s with the more technical and formal aspects of the camera, using long exposures to record light reflecting off water, extreme focus for his “no-focus” images, and low depth of field for his “Zen twigs” series. By 1960, he was regularly making photographs of his three children in abandoned rural Kentucky mansions and in the forests surrounding them. Highly imaginative, even surrealistic, the photographs evoke a world not normally acknowledged with the human eye. They suggest the complex emotions associated with childhood, intimacy, loss, and destruction. These images, which form the largest component of the exhibition, are what Guy Davenport has called “charming short stories that have never been written.” 

The visualization of the passage of time played an important role for Meatyard in all of his photographs —from long exposures to the maturation of his children, from timeworn buildings to the changing light gracing the natural world. For one of his last series, titled “Motion-Sound,” he made pictures by moving the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of woodland scenes that suggest visual sound patterns.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s engagement with photographing people is evident in a number of portraits he made of a circle of local writers with whom he developed great friendships, including Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, and Jonathan Greene. These friends not only provided intellectual inspiration and support, but often acted as collaborators in other projects. Meatyard also made a significant number of self-portraits in many of the same settings in which he photographed his friends and family.

About Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925 and moved to Lexington in 1950, after serving in the U.S. Navy and studying at Williams College and Illinois Wesleyan University. He went to work at Tinder-Krauss-Tinder, an optical firm, which also sold cameras and other photographic equipment. That same year he bought a camera to photograph the first of his three children. Meatyard spent the rest of his life in Lexington, where he worked as an optician at his shop Eyeglasses of Kentucky and photographed in his spare time. His membership in the Lexington Camera Club in 1954 led to an enduring friendship with his photography teacher, Van Deren Coke. In 1956, summer workshops at Indiana University brought him in contact with such influential photographers as Henry Holmes Smith, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. These interactions paved the way for Meatyard to launch his own photographic vision. Solo and group exhibitions soon followed across the country. His prodigious career ended in 1972 when he died of cancer.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Catalogue

Acclaimed writer and intimate friend of the photographer Guy Davenport made the selection of images, and Cynthia Young, ICP Assistant Curator, organized the exhibition. Ralph Eugene Meatyard will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by and interview with Davenport. The catalogue will be published by ICP / Steidl and released in December 2004. 

Guy Davenport (born 1927) is a poet, artist, illustrator, short-fiction writer, essayist, literary critic, and noted translator. After attending Merton College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he received a PhD from Harvard University with a thesis on the work of Ezra Pound, and then taught English at several universities. His work has garnered such prizes as the O. Henry Award for short stories, the 1981 Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Leviton-Blumenthal Prize for poetry, and a 1990 MacArthur Fellowship. Davenport lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

This exhibition was made possible with support from Frank and Mary Ann Arisman, Christian K. Keesee, and Richard and Ellen Kelson. 

International Center of Photography

www.icp.org