More than a Museum: Cornell Capa and the International Center of Photography (ICP)

Amidst the closure of illustrated magazines in the 1960s and 1970s, Cornell Capa—a former LIFE photographer, Magnum Photos president, and brother of war photographer Robert Capa—created the Fund for Concerned Photography in 1966. Critics heralded the Fund as the first museum dedicated to documentary photography in New York City. First located at the Riverside Museum and, by 1974, in a historic mansion on Museum Mile, the institution offered an alternative to the photo gallery scene on Madison Avenue through its location and the kinds of images it showed. But the ICP, as it became known, was much more than a place to exhibit photographs that could no longer appear in the defunct LIFE. This paper reconstructs the origins of the ICP to demonstrate that Cornell Capa shaped an international conversation about documentary photography by conceiving every exhibition as a traveling show and book that could, and did, travel the world with the support of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services. Beginning with the two “Concerned Photographer” exhibitions of 1967 and 1972, the ICP’s traveling program introduced viewers and photographers in Japan, Israel, and throughout Europe to what Cornell Capa defined as both an American and universal tradition of engaged picture making that began with Lewis Hine and culminated in the work of Robert Capa. In so doing, Capa influenced the work of international documentary photographers since the 1970s as well as how the history of documentary photography is told to this day.