There are no big crowds or large gestures in
But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World at the International Center of Photography in New York, which brings together the work of nine photographers to illuminate, as if by aleatory spotlight, corners of the United States in everyday endurance. Instead, the mood is quietly contemplative, a muted melancholy settling over the show like a light fog.
But Still, It Turns—what Galileo reportedly said upon the church’s rejection of his most famous theory—was planned before the pandemic but held until this February. If the exhibition feels prophetic, you might attribute that to the tricks of time. If it feels a bit random, that is no accident, writes curator and photographer Paul Graham in the stylish catalogue, published by MACK. “To some viewers, the artists’ work presented here, with its tributaries and eddies, its non-sequiturs and perambulations, its lack of drama and prize winning moments, will mean it does not appeal,” Graham writes in his essay-manifesto, framing the exhibition as a corrective for what he identifies as the “pendulum swing” of esteemed fine arts photography—“shift[ing]