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The photographs of Shellburne Thurber (Born 1949 in Boston) most frequently show unpopulated houses and rooms. Although the interiors are devoid of people, Thurber is interested in the ways they bear the presence of their occupants. “I became intrigued,” she says, “by the uncanny way in which inhabited spaces take on the energy of those who live and work in them.” Thurber first created this kind of image soon after her mother died, when photographing her mother’s spaces was a way to process her life and death on a deeper level. In addition to the homes of loved ones, Thurber has photographed spaces such as motel rooms and abandoned houses in the southern United States. Many of these images take on a funereal quality, evoking memory and loss.

Aunt Anna’s House—Stripped: The Pink Study shows a room in the New Hampshire house owned by Thurber’s Aunt Anna. After Anna died, Thurber took a series of photographs of the house’s empty rooms, the sites of numerous childhood memories. The only visual traces of Aunt Anna are the pink wallpaper and gilded mirror. What is most visible in the photograph are the absences: of the furniture Anna once owned, the pictures that lined her walls, and Anna herself. One small patch of light appears on the right wall. Thurber has said of this series, “These photographs, more than any of my other work, were an act of commemoration. It was all about color and light, and [Aunt Anna] was in the light.”

Thurber belongs to a group of artists often referenced as the “Boston School,” which also includes Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Mark Morrisoe.

Lorna Simpson (Born 1960 in New York) began to create text-and-image works in the mid-1980s in response to the assumptions about race, culture, and gender that viewers made when encountering her photographs in galleries and museums. By combining words with faceless portraits or photographs of body parts, Simpson calls our attention to the unconscious ways in which people are classified based on physical and cultural attributes.

In ID, Simpson mounts a plaque engraved with the word “identity” over the photograph of a woman with her back turned to the camera, and another bearing the word “identify” below the image of what appears to be a section of her hair. Just one letter different, the two words cue a process of racial recognition and naming. The alignment of these words with the images conveys the commonplace and racially motivated act of drawing conclusions about black women from visual cues such as hair or skin color.

This work augments the ICA/Boston’s strong and expanding collection of photography, which also includes Simpson’s May June July August ’57/09, 2009. The ICA holds a number of works that deal with issues of race and racism, by artists such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Glenn Ligon, and Kerry James Marshall. These works examine the complexity of identity, particularly in relation to racial stereotyping in the United States.

Roe Ethridge (Born 1969 in Miami) often focuses his camera on mundane subjects, ranging from a kitchen counter in a suburban home to shopping mall signs and barren winter landscapes. With the eerie drama of a David Lynch film, Ethridge’s photographs uncover the unusual in the ordinary.

In Holly at Marlow and Sons, the subject is a young woman who stands behind the counter at a nondescript café, perhaps Marlow and Sons in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The photographer inserts the viewer into a position that is familiar, considering options at a local shop while the staff waits to take the order. The appealing composition of this portrait is reinforced by the repetition of forms—the folded dollar bills in the tip jar, the black-and-white stripes on Holly’s turtleneck, the items filling the shelves behind the counter. Ethridge’s masterful use of shallow depth of field and soft focus calls to mind his commercial and product photography experience.

As the third work by Ethridge acquired by the ICA/Boston, Holly at Marlow and Sons helps suggest the breadth of his practice. This work joins a strong collection of photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, and, in representing an art image drawn from everyday experience, has a connection with the video works of Christian Jankowski and Rachel Perry.

Roe Ethridge’s (Born 1969 in Miami) work interrogates the relationship between commercial and fine art photography to reveal a shared language. He is celebrated for subtly manipulating banal subjects—from rotting oranges to suburban families—to heighten their intrinsic drama.

Untitled is part of a series of images of pigeons that Ethridge began in 2000. Using a high-speed flash, he captures the bird mid-flight. Connected to the history of photography, specifically the photographic experiments investigating animals’ motion conducted by Étienne Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, Ethridge’s series appears to monumentalize and eternalize an ordinary urban animal. The pigeon depicted, however, is no ordinary bird, but a trained “extra” rented from Universal Studios, set against a studio backdrop that mimics the blue of the sky.

Untitled joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection by this prominent contemporary photographer, whose work was featured in a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005, offering an opportunity to showcase its breadth and diversity.

Roe Ethridge (Born 1969 in Miami) is both a commercial photographer and a conceptually driven fine art photographer, and he uses each side of his practice to nourish the other. His photographic work displays the extremely high polish and sharp clarity of the print technology available for promotional photography today, yet his handsomely rendered views of people, places, and animals come across as things that are as alien as they are familiar.

County Line Meadowmere Park, one of sixteen photographs included in Ethridge’s solo exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2005, is from the series County Line, which records views of a quiet ocean-side community located on the Nassau County line in Queens, New York. As this photograph demonstrates, though the artist uses a particular location as a touchstone for this series, he balances specificity with generalization. This handsome view of boats, water, and foliage topped by a generous swath of blue sky and puffy clouds is reminiscent of a classic Dutch landscape, but it is edged with signs of contemporary life, such as the boats’ instrumentation and engines. Duality is further marked by the sky’s subtle shift in tone near the center of the image—Ethridge’s wry reference to the county line marked by the waterway shown. In these seductive images, dividing lines that are present but not fully visible keep the viewer at a certain distance.

Since 2001, when the ICA/Boston organized one of her first solo museum shows in the United States, Rineke Dijkstra (Born 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands) has become known for her incisively direct photographic and video portraits of individuals in the midst of change. Through series like The Bathers, showing awkward adolescents in swimsuits, New Mothers, documenting women minutes after giving birth, and others recording military recruits on their first day of induction and child refugees newly displaced, she exposes subjects at moments that capture the poignancy of their transition and transformation. To suggest both the self-conscious and the unconscious self, Dijkstra concentrates on gazes, poses, and gestures that project an uncertain mix of confidence and vulnerability.

Exemplifying Dijkstra’s subtly revealing portraiture, Odessa, Ukraine, August 11, 1993 presents a young boy in shorts and sandals who clutches two unclothed dolls to his bare chest. Standing in front of an urban stone wall, he is smeared and dusted with street dirt, his tan skin offset by the dolls’ pale pink bodies: their pert plastic smiles and bright eyes call attention to his comparatively stone-faced expression. Juxtaposing the childhood joy implied by the toys with a premature resignation glimpsed in her subject, Dijkstra hints at the fragility of hope, the fleetingness of youth, and an innocence soon to be lost.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Born 1951 in Hartford, CT) has been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential photographers of the past thirty years. Often labeled a member of the so-called Boston School (he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with David Armstrong and Nan Goldin), he has created a highly individual and influential body of work that spans documentary photography and staged tableaux linked to postmodern image construction. Known for their taut cinematic quality, his photographs build on the tension between fact and fiction, and stillness and flux, to picture the uncertainty, even contingency, of life on the threshold.

Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; $25 exemplifies diCorcia’s subtle yet incisive reflection on the currencies of fantasy and desire. With grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts, diCorcia made multiple trips to Los Angeles, where he scouted locations, staged scenarios, and located male prostitutes on Santa Monica Boulevard who agreed to pose for his camera for the same fee they would receive for their more typical service. As curator Bennett Simpson writes, the image shows “a movie-star handsome man seated on a patch of grass in front of a Del Taco drive-through sign. It is night, and the man appears to be waiting, possibly bored or deep in thought. In a sense he blends in perfectly with his surroundings: an advertisement for some fantasy, a product for sale, another fragment in L.A.’s landscape of come-ons. Even as car lights smear by in darkness, the man’s face—like the fast-food sign—remains perfectly still, a figure of desire raised out of its moment to stand for a more universal instability.”

The ICA/Boston collection includes numerous works by Boston School photographers, and the addition of this print enriches the museum’s capacity to tell the history of Boston art and artists. Furthermore, this work offers a bridge between the controlled approach of diCorcia’s early work and the flux and spontaneity of his later Streetwork series (represented in the ICA collection by Igor, 1987, and London, 1995). A major survey exhibition of diCorcia’s career was held at the ICA in 2007.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Born 1951 in Hartford, CT) has been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential photographers of the past thirty years. Often labeled a member of the so-called “Boston School” (he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with David Armstrong and Nan Goldin), he has created a highly individual and influential body of work that spans documentary photography and staged tableaux linked to postmodern image construction. Known for their taut cinematic quality, his photographs build on the tension between fact and fiction, stillness and flux, to picture the uncertainty, even contingency, of life on the threshold.

Igor is a classic image from an important transitional moment in diCorcia’s career, when he shifted from highly constructed interior tableaux to exterior street photography. It depicts a man on the New York subway, holding a goldfish in a water-filled plastic bag. Like many of diCorcia’s figures, the man appears motionless, lost in thought; one is not sure if he has been posed or found by the artist. A contrast between the speed of the subway and the blank stillness of the man’s body and face lends the image a psychological quality—as if he, like the fish in his bag, were trapped in a larger, hurtling world around him.

In her studio-based photographic practice, Anne Collier (Born 1970 in Los Angeles) brings the objective approach of technical and advertising photography to emotional and psychological subject matter drawn from books, posters, or magazines. As Collier explains, for her the studio is “both a framing device and … a ‘stage’ for various kinds of photographic tableaux.” Many of her photographs are shot with a rostrum setup that allows her to capture static objects from above. The technical requirements of this process—to avoid distortion, the body of the camera and the object being photographed must be perfectly parallel—give her photographs an exaggerated sense of flatness.

The series Open Book presents photographic tableaux of anonymous hands holding open books of photographs against a white background. In Open Book #3 (Island Wilderness), endpapers show a serene ocean view, the image reminiscent of a stock photograph that might be used for calendars or postcards. The crease at the book’s spine and the volume of its underlying pages slightly misalign the seascape. Viewers are acutely aware of looking at an image of someone looking at an image. As Collier comments, “there is a kind of doubling at play, where the real subject of the work is the activity of looking.” Playfully voyeuristic, the photograph also highlights the unbridgeable distance created by representation.