It’s not just your cellphone that’s a camera now. Your doorbell can take photographs, and so might your car, your refrigerator and your toothbrush. Camera-sporting athletes now do the work of sports photojournalists, and all New York City beat cops wear a body camera. War photography has gone from a specialist’s art to a citizen’s daily action, and the stupid selfie you uploaded yesterday has already been scraped into a database and could be sold to law enforcement agencies or a private detective. This is the paradox: the average photograph has never been more banal or irrelevant, yet photography as a medium has never mattered more.

In 2020 we are in desperate, desperate need of a richer discourse about this new, pervasive era of photography: how the lens-based image became a ubiquitous thing, and how any image or photographer can gain distinction in this flood of pictures. Cross your fingers that the International Center of Photography finds its way there soon.

Since its founding by Cornell Capa (brother of Robert Capa, the photojournalist who shot the most notorious picture of the Spanish Civil War), ICP has stuck up for photography as both an art form and a historical record, but it has bumbled in the time of the social photo. What should a photography museum do when photographs are just about everywhere? ICP has to answer that in a new home at Essex Crossing, the large new Lower East Side development, though its initial programming suggests it’s still not sure.