A celebrated photographer with roots in Boston and at the ICA/Boston, Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) has made intense portraits of her friends, family, and strangers. In 1985, the ICA presented Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, one of her first museum exhibitions, and has shown her work numerous times in subsequent years.

Chrissy with Her 100-Year-Old Grandmother, Provincetown is part of a gift from the collection of Goldin’s parents, Lillian and Hyman Goldin, facilitated by the artist in 2006. A silver gelatin print, the medium Goldin preferred for her early work, the photograph was taken during her student days at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Even at this nascent stage of her career, the image shows the artist’s distinctive ability to capture moments pregnant with meaning. Sitting at the bedside of an ailing grandparent, her friend Chrissy stares into the distance, beyond the room and the frame. The emotional connection between the two is evident: Chrissy tenderly holds her grandmother’s frail hand to her chest as the elderly woman gazes up at her intently, as if searching her face for reassurance or meaning. Among the first works to enter the ICA’s collection, it marks the museum’s commitment to this original and important Boston artist.

Cindy Sherman (Born 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ) is known for fusing performance and photography in identity-morphing “self-portraits” that explore female character types. Since her days as a student in Buffalo in the mid-1970s, Sherman has been taking photographs of herself in highly staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. She began the series Untitled Film Stills in 1977 shortly after moving to New York City, and continued the series until 1980 when, as she says, she “ran out of clichés.” Totaling seventy black-and-white photographs, this series is Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature photographic practice: playing the roles of both actor and director, changing her persona with simple props and costumes.

The first six prints in the series were shot in Sherman’s New York apartment and reveal snippets of the domestic life of an imagined blonde movie star. Untitled Film Still #3 shows a woman wearing an apron standing over the kitchen sink, surrounded by ordinary housewares: a bottle of dish soap and drying rack, a spice jar on a shelf, and, in the foreground, an open container of salt and the handle of a stovetop pot. Captured while pausing during a domestic activity, the woman stares over her shoulder, her right hand wrapped around her stomach. Set in the banal environment of a cramped apartment kitchen, the scene assumes a tension as the figure’s gaze suggests an unseen force in an unknown narrative. The title’s reference to the movie industry lends a voyeuristic quality to this glimpse into the private life of a female character who has yet to discover herself.

Alongside an established profile in the world of fashion and magazine photography, Collier Schorr (Born 1963 in New York) has been working in portrait photography since the late 1980s, particularly of adolescents. She has documented portraits of teenagers across the United States, mostly of white youth, as well as social and cultural figures, performers, wrestlers, and soldiers. Her work addresses the desires and conflicts that attend an adolescent’s dawning sexuality and the construction of gender. The subjects in her photographs typically display the longing, intimacy, and alienation that accompany the formation of identity, and her titles frequently point to these issues of gender fluidity. In all her portraits, Schorr offers minimal settings and staging, focusing instead on her sitter with sharp contrasts, vivid colors and shadows, and personal encounters through the camera.

Interested in problems of identity—particularly sexuality and gender—Collier Schorr (Born 1963 in New York) explores the construction of masculinity in photographs of wrestlers, young soldiers, and solitary adolescent figures. Her subjects are often ambiguous in gender, an early instance of the blurring of boundaries that has become topical today. Her formal approach shows the influence of German photographers Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff.

Schorr’s portraits often relay teenagers’ coming-of-age stories, across genders and nationalities, in images that bear traces of desire and longing, fantasy and fiction. Lovely to Feel and to Touch depicts a shirtless boy leaning against a tree, posing with confidence and ease. Schorr has said of her work: “I wanted to examine bodies as forms outside of popular cultural motifs, almost nude, constantly moving in both structured and unconscious ways.”

Joining a number of portraits by Schorr in the ICA/Boston collection, this acquisition further strengthens the representation of this important contemporary photographer. It joins a strong collection of works by seminal contemporary photographers such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, and Catherine Opie.

Collier Schorr (Born 1963 in New York) has been making candid portraits since the late 1980s. Best known for photographs of adolescent men and women, she has recorded teenagers across Germany and the United States, in addition to making photographic series of wrestlers, young soldiers, and solitary figures. Schorr’s work addresses the desires and conflicts that attend an adolescent’s dawning sexuality, especially the social construction of gender. Her often androgynous subjects display the longing, intimacy, and alienation that accompany the formation of identity, and her titles frequently point to these issues. Schorr’s refusal of the binary logic of girl/boy extends to other social and historical oppositions, such as German nationalism and Jewish identity.

South of No North is an intimate portrait of two adolescent girls embracing in a field. One has shoulder-length hair and wears red lipstick and a thin white bra, and the other has close-cropped hair, more pronounced features, and appears to be wearing a binding bra. The intimacy of the young same-sex couple, the masculinity of the figure on the right, and the bucolic setting combine to produce a portrait of budding sexuality that interrogates conventional representations of gender and love.

The ICA/Boston holds a number of portraits by Collier Schorr in its collection, all of which explore the rich terrain of gender and sexuality. Schorr is an important contemporary photographer, whose work adds to the ICA collection’s strength in work by women.

Thomas Ruff (Born 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) is one of a trio of artists who have transformed the medium of photography in contemporary art. He and fellow Kunstakademie Düsseldorf students Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth emerged in Germany in the late 1980s and since then have influenced a rising generation of photographers. The three are known for exceedingly large-scale pictures and impossible (though realistic) images benefiting from digital enhancement. Their work in turn emerges from the Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity, a movement of the 1920s and ’30s in Germany. Photographers associated with the movement, such as August Sander and Albert Renger-Patsch, presented reality as only a camera can––that is, in a deceptively straightforward and objective way.

In the 1980s, Thomas Ruff created a series of portraits of classmates and friends from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a renowned art school led at the time by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ruff’s portraits present each figure against a plain white background, in the manner of identification photography. While portraits are often staged to reveal aspects of a subject’s personal history, Ruff provides little beyond the person’s name as the title. This photograph is of Martin Vossing, a man we know little about. Ruff’s inexpressive approach to portraiture is in line with that of the Bechers’ work on such architectural features as water tanks.

Alongside portrait works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, and Collier Schorr, Ruff’s Martin Vossing forms part of a strong collection of works by important contemporary photographers.

In her moving-image work, Pipilotti Rist (Born 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland) creates visually charged environments characterized by lush color and distorted, fragmented imagery. Building narrative through layers of video and sound, Rist blurs the boundaries between visual art and popular culture. Everyday images become strange and unfamiliar. According to Rist, “Art’s task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and destroy clichés and prejudices.”

Remake of the Weekend (Stills) is essentially an excerpt from a 1998 video installation of the same name. The work references a 1967 film by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend, which examines the collapse of French bourgeois society through the story of a weekend trip that turns into a nightmare of revolution, cannibalism, and murder. The stills capture Rist’s expansive and seductive use of color and perspective. While one image is an abstracted surface of unrecognizable bright red, pink, and purple forms, another shows a naked male running down the street in the rain.

One of the defining artists of her generation, Catherine Opie (Born 1961 in Sandusky, OH) is known for her photographic portraits and landscapes. She frequently combines the two genres by training her camera on people within their environments—from Boy Scouts at their campgrounds to ice fishermen on frozen lakes and surfers waiting for the next wave. Drawing on the tradition of American landscape painting and of social documentary photography by artists like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Opie gives us a view of democracy in action. Her photographs explore the intimate relations between community and politics, citizens and the landscape, offering a dynamic, open, and complex portrait of the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Untitled #1 (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) documents a six-day international festival that occurs every August outside Hart, Michigan. Drawing nearly 10,000 visitors annually, the event is built, staffed, and run entirely by women for women (referred to as “womyn” to avoid overtones of patriarchy) of all age groups, ethnic backgrounds, and abilities. The festival was founded in 1976 by Mary Kindig, Kristie Vogel, and Lisa Vogel in response to the misogyny they experienced working at festivals and music venues run by men. Through a sea of tents, bodies, and trees, Opie presents a collective identity that has come to represent an idyllic version of female solidarity, diversity, and community.

Following the 2011 exhibition at the ICA/Boston Catherine Opie: Empty and Full, the artist donated Untitled #1 (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) to the museum. The addition of this work augments the ICA’s focus on work by women artists and its strong holdings of photography by such leading artists as Rineke Dijkstra, Lorna Simpson, and Sara VanDerBeek.

Ray Navarro (Born 1964 in Simi Valley, CA; died 1990 in New York) and Zoe Leonard (Born 1961 in Liberty, NY) emerged as artists in New York in the 1990s. Working primarily in photography, both artists have harnessed the conceptual aspects of the medium.

Navarro conceived Equipped after losing his vision due to AIDS-related medical complications, and he reached out to Leonard to help him produce it. Leonard functioned as his “eyes” in executing the work, recalling that “it was a very moving and intimate process, working together with him.” Each photograph in this triptych portrays a mobility device used by people with a disability, and is accompanied by a sexual euphemism or phrase etched on an office-style desk plaque. The juxtapositions of images and words, such as an image of a wheelchair flipped over accompanied by the phrase “HOT BUTT,” rearticulate the sexualized body by signaling the physical degradation caused by a disease that is often perceived as a consequence of sexual behavior. The frames are painted a warm pink to evoke the generic Caucasian flesh colors of most prosthetic devices, underscoring the link between the disabled body and assistive mechanisms.

Building on the ICA/Boston’s strength in photography, Equipped helps the museum tell the history of the AIDS crisis and its impact on art production and artistic communities, a key theme in the 2012 ICA group exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, in which this work appeared.

Boris Mikhailov has been called “the former Soviet Union’s most influential living photographer,” yet it has only been in the past decade—since the fall of the USSR—that his work has been widely exhibited in either the East or the West. Mikhailov’s exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2004 was the artist’s first retrospective in the United States. His career has run parallel to the height, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Over the past forty years, he has produced an exceptional body of work that bears witness to these tumultuous times.

Mikhailov’s Case History series documents the homeless community that has appeared since the end of Communism in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. In the late 1990s, he began photographing the so-called bomzhes, approaching them with his wife, Vita, and asking if he could take their photograph. The subjects, with tattered clothing and ailing bodies, bluntly reflect the economic deterioration of the post-Soviet era. Here, an older woman who appears in several photographs from the series crouches in a somewhat awkward pose in front of a tree. She looks cold in this wintry scene; her clothes are layered and threadbare, her gloveless hands clasped. In printing the image at almost life-size, Mikhailov confronts the viewer with his subject’s grim reality. Even so, her piercing blue eyes look straight ahead with a steady, sure gaze, never fully revealing what must be her daily struggles. Mikhailov’s Case History photographs expose a reality that most do not see or would rather ignore; they archive a community and a reality that would otherwise be erased, like so much of the suffering during the Soviet era.

Untitled is one of two works from this series in the ICA/Boston’s collection, and it joins the museum’s strong holdings of contemporary photography by such figures as Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin.

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