International Center of Photography (ICP)

Iconic photography can change the world. This is the place to see those images and learn how to make them yourself.

Part museum, part school, the ICP opened in 1974, founded by Cornell Capa to honor his brother, Robert Capa, the famous war photographer who landed at D-Day in 1944 with a camera, and who died stepping on a landmine in Vietnam.

After World War II, Robert joined Henri Cartier-Bresson to create Magnum Photos, a collective of independent photojournalists who shaped history by telling the stories others couldn’t reach. Think Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl or Stuart Franklin’s Tank Man from Tiananmen Square.

The exhibitions here carry that spirit forward. They bring together photographers who pay deep, careful attention to fame and fashion, precarity and small-town rituals, to cities and the architecture of public life. Their images show how people live, struggle, celebrate, and endure.

This is photography as presence. It’s proof and a way of saying, I was there.

Cornell Capa founded the ICP in 1974 with one core belief: that great socially and politically minded photography can change the world. What started as a gallery on East 94th Street morphed, over time, into a museum and school. Since 2020, it’s been at a state-of-the-art location at Ludlow and Essex Streets, gathering the museum, school, and iconic bookstore under a single roof.