With the move to Mana Contemporary, our eclectic collections [library, archives, and museum collection]—which span the history of the medium—have dedicated climate-controlled spaces for storage, a print study room large enough for classes, and a lab space.
We also have a dedicated gallery space at Mana where we can highlight collection works; recent exhibitions include Weegee’s Bowery, featuring images of the neighborhood where our new museum is located, and The Early Years of Rhythm and Blues: Photographs by Benny Joseph from the Documentary Arts Collection, a treasure-trove of African American photography.
ICP founder Cornell Capa recognized that photographs communicated to a mass audience via print, and that story was not being captured adequately in art museums, like MoMA, or technology museums, like Eastman House.
ICP’s library, archives, and museum collections trace those inter-relationships, and so ICP at Mana is uniquely positioned to foster a deeper understanding of visual culture in the 21st century to anyone interested in what these imagemakers wished to communicate.
Researchers will now be able to access the photography collection as well as the archives and rare photography books all in one location.
At Mana, our cataloguing, digitization, and research efforts will be energized so that there is even more information about the collection available online, at a moment when linked open data makes it possible to reunite everything we collect to its complex intellectual context.
ICP plans to establish itself in the educational life of New Jersey as it did in New York City, serving classes in a variety of disciplines through its collection, and bringing our popular workshops to Mana, particularly those that would benefit from proximity to collection such as book and zine classes, photo history, and pinhole photography.
