As access has exponentially grown to visualization and distribution technologies, what changes is not the urgency to capture the world with evidentiary, critical or even forbidden images. Rather, today’s social justice images connect to, but differ from, earlier iterations from these struggles in two key ways: they are known primarily through their scale and speed—a veritable cascade of undifferentiated images—and secondly, their changed viewing platforms that by design rip images from their initial instantiation, maker, or even cause. In our new world of making and receiving images defined by their volume and loss of context, the show’s diverse curators use the ICP to build context: an image holding environment where connection and cohesion accrue through curation albeit with some definitive difference.
This room, in its place, the Bronx, NYC, with more surrounding wall text, and the volunteer who believes in the Bronx, and photography, and the power of its people, is one such radical place (a good holding environment) for the watching, thinking about, and making use of witness images. This place is a context from which these images accrue deeper meaning and greater value, written as they are, not into a callous, corporate internet, or a ready-steady flow of social media, but rather, a well-thought-out history, analysis, community and purpose, a place where small screen evidence by ordinary people can meet more ordinary people who care enough to get there, learn more, and engage.
