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Willie Doherty has been a pioneer in contemporary photography since the 1980s. Born in Northern Ireland, the traumatic history of the region has been a major focus of his work. Doherty’s photographs explore post-conflict settings that suggest a troubled past, addressing issues of collective trauma, memory, and subjectivity. The scenes of isolated or abandoned places are often from his hometown of Derry, a city that was deeply divided by religious and political partisanship in the 1960s and ’70s.

Suspicious Vehicle depicts a red car that has been abandoned on the side of a darkened road. It is unclear if the vehicle was intentionally abandoned by its driver, whether the driver was taken from the car against their will, or if the car itself is a weapon. Regardless, through the combination of the title, darkness of night, and lack of human presence, the image conveys an unsettling scene that suggests some sort of unfortunate incident has (or will) occur.

The addition of Suspicious Vehicle to the ICA/Boston’s collection expands the museum’s strong holdings in photography, joining another photograph by Doherty (Factory III, 1994) as well as photographs by Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin that suggest a pregnant narrative moment.

2012.28

Tacita Dean’s explorations of the relationship between analogue media and the vicissitudes of time, history, and our natural world have made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Film, photography, and drawing form the foundation of her practice, and in each instance the chosen medium amplifies her themes. At its heart, Dean’s work is grounded in the material, temporal, and associative qualities of 16mm film. In poetic works that luxuriate in slowness, concentration, and the soft colors and tones of film stock, she approaches iconic architecture, portraits of artists for whom time and movement are critical components of their work (Merce Cunningham, for instance), and the manufacture of film stock itself. Interspersed with these occasionally monumental pieces (she pioneered an almost three-story film projection in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall) are lyrical series of photographs, drawings, and prints that mine the historical presentation of place and history.

Dean’s The Russian Ending is a series of prints that depict the aftermath of an unspecified disaster. Explosions, shipwrecks, funerals, despoiled landscapes, and ambiguous events are annotated by the artist, suggesting possible scenarios. The series takes its title and theme from a tradition in early twentieth-century film production in Denmark (then a major generator of films) in which alternate endings for films bound for U.S. or Russian markets were offered. While the U.S. received films with happy endings, Russia received films that ended in disaster—one conclusion for the land of Disney and an entirely different one for the land of Dostoyevsky. In Dean’s series, the effects of industry, mechanized labor, and war play are rendered in deep, atmospheric tones, underscoring their ambiguity and suggesting history’s inherent subjectivity. The wry title both conjures the last century’s forking path of shared experience for the U.S. and Russia, and announces the end of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Ending is in dialogue with many works in the ICA/Boston collection. It makes an intriguing pair with Boris Mikhailov’s sardonic, sometimes bleak depictions of Ukrainian citizens, but also connects with serial investigations into the subjectivity of identity by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cindy Sherman. The representation of war, conflict, and trauma are recurring themes in the works in the collection, ranging from Doris Salcedo’s poetic sculpture to Trevor Paglen’s depictions of twenty-first-century war.

2015.34

Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has made work that explores the sphere of human relationships. Most closely associated with conceptual art, Calle employs provocative methods and a wide range of media, including books, photography, video, film, and performance, to investigate subjects such as identity and intimacy. She is well known for her voyeuristic and detective-like projects, which have featured others’, and, several times, her own, life  in its emotional and psychological dimensions. In her documentation and presentation of these performances, she often uses text and photography in ways that redefine notions of truth, fiction, and narrative.

The Doctor’s Daughter is a photograph from Calle’s larger project by of the same title that tells the story of a doctor’s daughter, a little girl named Sophie, who grows up to become a striptease artist. The black-and-white photograph print depicts a woman (presumably the character Sophie, who is played by Calle) lying on the floor on a bed of rumpled clothes and strewn belongings. Below the photograph is a text written in the first person recounting the subject’s work as a striptease artist, including a dramatic and violent encounter with a fellow stripper “on January 8, 1981” that led to her leaving the profession. The text functions as a caption, endowing the sexually charged and seedy scene with a degree of authenticity. Together, text and image construct the fictive protagonist who elides with the artist’s own biography.

This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography, especially work by artists who examine identity, such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Catherine Opie.

2014.04

Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff examines how memory and photography may affect our perceptions and experiences of viewing art. Using a vocabulary of modernist forms, Shirreff manipulates objects to create temporary assemblages that she photographs. The artist often further manipulates the printed photographs, bending, folding, or breaking apart the images to create novel artistic forms.

In A.P. (no. 9), Shirreff made tabletop-scale compositions that evoke mid-twentieth-century modernist sculptures. For this series, she references the outdoor geometric works of artist Tony Smith and reflects on the different experiences of interacting with Smith’s sculptures in situ and seeing them reproduced in print. A.P. (no. 9) is a photographic image of a maquette made of foam core and plaster. The artist used photo-editing software to slice the picture in half and rearrange the composition. “In a way I don’t think of A.P. works so much as photographs as much as I think of them as pictures of sculptures that don’t exist. They have a strange physicality, they are images of sculptures but then the images themselves have these sculptural components. The pictures are folded down the center to reference this notion of book binding” says Shirreff.

This piece is a unique addition to the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, which includes numerous photographs, and joins a large sculptural work by Erin Shirreff titled Catalogue, 39 parts (Value Lessons), 2015.

800.14.02

Photographer Jimmy DeSana was part of a countercultural punk community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village during the 1970s and ’80s. He made portraits of many important figures from that scene, including singers Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, as well as of his friends and lovers, who recur in his photographic work. He also played a definitive, though often under recognized role in the rise of photo-conceptualism in the 1980s—a genre that would question the very nature of photographic representation. DeSana specialized in staged tableaux where he photographed himself and others, usually naked and alone in color-saturated interiors. Striking unlikely poses with carefully chosen props, his body would oscillate androgynously and erotically between subject and object, person and fetish, enabling a visual association of the unconscious. Mediated through the lens of the camera, DeSana’s subjects, iconic and anonymous alike, become pliable forms that move within and among layers of culture and representation.

In Marker Cones, DeSana crouches laterally on all fours, his slender figure poised on inverted orange cones that cap his hands and feet. Photographed from behind, his body becomes a headless, unidentifiable creature comprised of triangles and parallelograms. The marker cones evoke a similar sexual indeterminacy, gendered feminine as makeshift stilettos and masculine as the detritus of roadside construction. Dramatic lighting cast his skin in a feverish and sexy glow. A glittering field of tinsel-like artificial grass adds to this surreal photographic composition.

This work is an important addition to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography and art of the 1980s. Joining holdings of work by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Willie Doherty, and Roe Ethridge, Marker Cones adds to the debates surrounding photography and the idea of truth.

2013.06

2012.21

Richard Prince is one of the most influential American photographers of his time, having come of age during the 1970s and the heyday of appropriation. While the artist also creates paintings, sculpture, and installation, his photography has made the most lasting contribution to contemporary art history. By the early 1990s, Richard Prince and his iconic Marlboro Man images had become synonymous with the genre of appropriated photography and the problems of artistic authorship. During the mid to late ’90s, the artist moved from New York City to upstate New York, and his focus turned to more personal and immediate subject matter.

Upstate comes from a series Prince made to document an environment and lifestyle completely separate from the locus of the art world and excesses of New York City. These stark images of above-ground swimming pools, abandoned cars, and grassy fields highlight an isolated yet strikingly common vision of rural America. Prince finds moments of beauty in these overlooked and undervalued features of the landscape. For instance, the single-story, personal storage facility has a row of orange roll top doors—their serial quality evoking Minimalism—and sits within a bleak landscape. While Prince’s photos of his environs draw on a long history of photographers locating decisive scenes in unremarkable places (i.e., Walker Evans and William Eggleston), Prince’s focus on the rougher aspects of rural life distinguishes his work.

This work joins the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photographs by artists such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, Thomas Ruff, and Collier Schorr. As an artist, Prince represents an important piece of the history of appropriation, bringing his work into conversation with that of Dara Birnbaum, Lorna Simpson, and Cindy Sherman.

2013.10

Luther Price is known for his work with Super-8 and 16mm film, particularly for constructing films out of discarded prints of documentaries, snippets of Hollywood features, and other fragments of cinema. He frequently physically manipulates this found footage by scratching, distressing, and painting the film surface, or even by burying it in the earth so that natural processes such as rotting and mold growth begin to change the film. In recent years, Price has begun to experiment with handmade slides. Again, he begins with found film that he painstakingly cuts up, reassembles, and alters. He also sandwiches detritus and found materials—from insects to dirt, dust, and glue—between two glass plates and then projects the resulting image onto the gallery wall. Through his reuse of analogue photographic materials, Price produces beautiful, abstracted images connected to histories of appropriation, abstraction, and experimental film.

Light Fracture is one of two slide works Price made in 2013 that are now held by the ICA/Boston (the other being Number 9, acquired from that year’s Foster Prize exhibition at the museum). Using slide projectors, he presents the handmade slides as a cycle of moving still images, an arrangement that connects his work to animation and early cinematic tropes. The individual images vary dramatically—from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from silhouettes of monstrous insects to beautiful abstract patterns, from dark earthy tones to brilliant reds and oranges—but taken as a whole, the series consistently captures light as it is projected, refracted, and splintered through the materials. The result is a visually arresting experience that evokes entropy, mortality, and otherworldly visions.

This piece contributes to the ICA/Boston’s ongoing support of Boston artists, joining works by artists such as Taylor Davis, Kelly Sherman, and others. Additionally, it makes a strong addition to the collection by broadening the conversation around painterly abstraction in photography and film by artists such as Kader Attia, Noriko Furunishi, and Pipilotti Rist.

2014.09

Trevor Paglen’s artwork draws on his long-time interest in investigative journalism and the social sciences, as well as his training as a geographer. His work seeks to show the hidden aesthetics of American surveillance and military systems, touching on espionage, the digital circulation of images, government development of weaponry, and secretly funded military projects. The artist has conducted extensive research on the subject and published a series of books and lectures about covert operations undertaken by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Since the 1990s, Paglen has photographed isolated military air bases located in Nevada and Utah using a telescopic camera lens. Untitled (Reaper Drone) reveals a miniature drone midflight against a luminous morning skyscape. The drone is nearly imperceptible, suggested only as a small black speck at the bottom of the image. The artist’s photographs are taken at such a distance that they abstract the scene and distort our capacity to make sense of the image. His work both exposes hidden secrets and challenges assumptions about what can be seen and fully understood.

Paglen’s Untitled (Reaper Drone) enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of photography and is in productive conversation with works by such artists as Jenny Holzer and Hito Steyerl, which similarly deal with political and economic systems, secrecy, and surveillance.

800.13.05

Nicholas Nixon is a photographer known for his work in portraiture and documentary, his use of the 8-by-10-inch view camera, and his engagement with duration. In numerous series, Nixon gets to know his subjects while photographing them, making the role of time inherent to the medium of photography an integral part of the content and process of his work. His photographs possess a high degree of detail and often present closely cropped views of his subjects. Nixon came to Boston in the 1970s and has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for more than thirty-five years, while making important documentation of his neighborhood and community.

For Nixon’s hallmark series People with AIDS, the artist followed fifteen men with the disease, sensitively conveying its uncompromisingly harsh progress during the years when the government and medical establishment’s neglect turned AIDS into a crisis of epic proportions. A portion of the series was included in Nixon’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988. By the time the series was published as a book in 1991, all the subjects had passed away due to the disease. At the time of the exhibition, the works drew strongly opposed reactions from critics: while Douglas Crimp described them as perpetuating stereotypes about people with AIDS and as lacking social context, others characterized them as empathetic, humanistic, and corrective to moralizing judgments. This set of five prints depicts George Gannett from October 1987 until his death in February 1989. The photographs show Gannett in his home in Providence, Rhode Island, accompanied by his partner, petting his cat, and lying in a bed near the end of his battle with the disease. The ordinariness and domesticity of Gannett’s existence permeate the images.

This work contributes to the ICA/Boston’s strength in photography, especially by artists of the so-called Boston School, including Nan Goldin. It also joins a work that deals explicitly with the AIDS crisis by Ray Navarro and Zoe Leonard.

2013.09.1-5