International Center of Photography

The Zoe Strauss exhibition is where I spent most of my time at ICP. I wasn’t crazy about all of her pictures but a few of them really did strike me. There was one of a man who had just been shot in the leg and was on a stretcher smoking a cigarette. There was one of a yellow door with KKK written in black and white on it. I loved the juxtapositions of colors and ideas in her work.

The photograph that struck me the most was the one of the naked man lying on the bed in some trashy room. When I first rounded the corner and looked to my right I had a good chuckle at this comical specimen but after a while the photo really got me thinking. Yeah we were all making fun of him and joking that we’d all write about the naked man but there was something to that photo that made us stop and look and chat and laugh. He was so nonchalant in his nudity and in his surroundings, which were pretty deplorable. He was posed like a model of the Renaissance, like some Venus of Urbino. But he definitely did not have the ideal Greco-Roman figure.

Maybe it’s that juxtaposition that had me lingering there. Maybe it was wondering how Zoe Strauss could have possibly ended up in a situation in which she took this photo. Maybe it was the questions of where is he, what did he do last night, who is he, why is he there, what is he doing now? It was comical at first but I slowly realized all the layers behind this one photograph.

It’s not like I’d go home and order a print of it online, hang it up in my room. I really don’t have a desire to look at that picture, I didn’t at the time I was either.. but something kept me there. This man was interesting, and Zoe Strauss captured that.