The International Center of Photography‘s new museum on the Bowery is not one of those museums you go to for the architecture. Most of the gallery space is below ground and fairly generic, with the street-level space mainly devoted to an outpost of Maman and seating that I presume is for programming.

There’s also a small bookstore operated by Spaces Corners of Pittsburgh. I don’t mean them to take this personally—the staffers were nice, and the selection was fine—but when did New York City cede its cultural cred to second-tier cities? (Answer: When Manhattan became unaffordable to young creative folks.)

I was prepared to be told I couldn’t take photos—the irony would’ve been delicious—but it’s totally fine. As you can see below, visitors will also need to be ready to be photographed themselves…. The “universe” part always kills me. Let us never underestimate our own importance.

As surprising as it is in a new cultural institution, the lack of architectural zip rightly puts the emphasis on the art. The current exhibit, Public, Private, Secret, is about “the concept of privacy in today’s society and [it] studies how contemporary self-identity is tied to public visibility.” Which is another way of warning you that you’re going to get not just art about social media, but also actual social media from celebrities…. The theme didn’t really hold for me: Cindy Sherman’s photography, for example, has little to do with privacy; Merry Alpern’s famous sex-club shots have little to do with self-identity. (Paging Arne Svenson! And how about something interactive, like the camera that used to take stills of people entering the Brasserie in Midtown?) But if you don’t worry too much about the overall point and just enjoy the work individually, I think you’ll find much of it engaging and worthwhile.

The lone street-level gallery was given over to four artists, but I bounced off of it.

You have to admire how much art the curators jammed into the downstairs galleries.

Even the nooks and stairwells were deployed.

“Great news!” I can just hear the curators telling artist Kurt Caviezel. “You’re in our inaugural show! And we’ve found an amazing space overlapped by a fire extinguisher cabinet!”

On the other hand, that location did lend a certain emphasis. Caviezel’s piece, “Pas de Deux,” comprises stills, taken from a publicly accessible webcam, of a nude man dancing along to a video; it nails the exhibit’s mission better than most pieces. I remain unconvinced that the audio piece in the adjacent stairwell—those are its speakers in the second image above—belongs at a photography museum at all (said the Tribeca blogger writing about a museum in Nolita).

My favorite piece was a set of the photos, taken by Don Mullin McCullin, at the center of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).

Last but not least, the Maman café has a walk-up window on the street. My dog can’t get that far north anymore, but I’m still incredibly fond of these windows. More, please.

Previous Field Trip posts:
• Noguchi Museum & Socrates Sculpture Park
• The Fisher Landau Center for Art
• The High Bridge
• The Broad
• Crown Heights
• Spuyten Duyvil
• New York Botanical Garden
• Bed-Stuy
• The New Whitney Museum
• Bushwick-ish
• The Rockaways
• Greenpoint
• Wave Hill
• Governors Island
• F.D.R. Four Freedoms Park
• Litchfield County, Conn.
• One Wall Street
• Behind the Scenes at Grand Central Terminal
• The Howard/Crosby Microneighborhood
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• East River Ferry
• Museum of American Finance