A Century of Image Overload

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Are there too many images in the world? Too many of the wrong kind? Too many that we don’t like or want or need? These feel like very contemporary questions, but they have a rich and fascinating history. A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload takes a long look at our worries and compulsive fascination with the proliferation of photographic images.

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In the 1920s, with the rapid increase in illustrated magazines and daily newspapers, commentators asked whether society could survive the visual inundation. Artists looked to mass-media imagery and archives of all kinds to rethink the world around them.

The artists of Dada, surrealism, pop, situationism, conceptualism, and postmodernism were all, in different ways, horrified and mesmerized by the seemingly endless supply of images. They cast a critical eye over the clichés, stereotypes, and repetitive images, and looked to unearth alternative histories and counternarratives. From scrapbooks to internet memes, from collage and image appropriation to art made by algorithms, A Trillion Sunsets highlights unlikely parallels and connections across distinct decades.

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The exhibition will be showcased in ICP’s downtown building at 79 Essex Street in New York, which opened in January 2020 and unites the museum and ICP’s school for first time in over 20years. On view concurrently will be Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, which features photographs that are uncanny dimensional doubles for the objects they depict.

From picture scrapbooks to internet memes, to collage and image appropriation, to art made by algorithms, A Trillion Sunsets offers powerful insights and new perspectives on our long love-hate relationship with images, highlighting unlikely parallels and connections across decades.

With the rapid increase in illustrated magazines and newspapers in the 1920s, commentators began to ask whether society could survive the visual inundation. Since then, the art movements of Dada, Surrealism, Pop, Situationism, Conceptualism, and Postmodernism were all, in different ways, horrified and mesmerized by the seemingly endless image supply. Artists have cast a critical eye over the clichés, stereotypes, and repetitive pictures, and looked to unearth alternative histories and counter-narratives, re-presenting and reinterpreting forgotten images and archives.

“Have your way with images, or they will have their way with you,” says curator David Campany.“With this exhibition we explore very contemporary questions in the context of a rich and fascinating history.”

Exhibition Highlights

A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload opens with pioneering photo collagist HannahHӧch’s Album, 1933, for which she collected, cut, and pasted images in resistance to the emerging media stereotypes and the specter of German fascism. In the era of Instagram andPinterest mood boards, Hӧch’s dissection of formulaic images is a revelation, and feels thoroughly contemporary.

Nakeya Brown’s If Nostalgia Were Colored Brown, 2015, is a series of still life compositions combining the covers of record albums by Black women musicians and cosmetic products.Sumptuous yet pensive, her work asks viewers to look again at the history of beauty standards.Brown’s photographs hang in the exhibition next to an advertising photo of a white woman’s eye reflected in a cosmetic compact mirror. The image is a 1983 appropriation by Richard Prince, akey figure of the Pictures Generation, who reworked media images in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Justine Kurland dismantles canonical photobooks by white men, reconfiguring their contents as intricate collages to release unseen desires and new aesthetic possibilities. With each book, Kurland removes the pages and makes her collages on the inside of its cover, as if to suggest her work was always there, a hidden potential that has finally emerged. One of the books Kurland remakes is by Harry Callahan, a photographer who himself made a series of meticulous collages in the 1950s, some of which are also on view in the exhibition.

Walker Evans’s classic Penny Picture Display, 1936, is an image of 210 portrait photos, observed through the window of a commercial photographer’s studio in Savannah, Georgia.Photographs appear constantly within Evans’s photographs. He grasped, earlier than most, that photographs are simply part of the modern environment, and that to not photograph them would be a misrepresentation of our era.

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About the Curator

David Campany is a curator, writer, and managing director of programs at the International Center of Photography, New York. His books include On Photographs (2020), A Handful of Dust (2015), Art and Photography (2003), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2011), Walker Evans: The Magazine Work(2014), and Photography and Cinema (2008).

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About the International Center of Photography

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Cornell Capa founded ICP in 1974 to champion “concerned photography”—socially and politically minded images that can educate and change the world.Through exhibitions, education programs, community outreach, and public programs, ICP offers an open forum for dialogue about the power of the image. Since its inception, ICP has presented more than 700 exhibitions, provided thousands of classes, and hosted a wide variety of public programs. ICP launched its new integrated center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side inJanuary 2020. Located at 79 Essex Street, ICP is the cultural anchor of Essex Crossing, one ofthe most highly anticipated and expansive mixed-use developments in New York City. ICP pays respect to the original stewards of this land, the Lenape people, and other indigenous communities. Visit icp.org to learn more about the museum and its programs.

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Internatioal Center of Photography

79 Essex Street, New York, NY 10002

Jan 28, 2022 – May 02, 2022

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