ICP Latitudes Exhibition, Photography as Witness

Photography as a Practice of Attention at ICP

The first time I walked into ICP on Ludlow Street, it was raining. Not dramatically rather, just enough to quiet the street and blur the storefronts into reflections. I remember standing still longer than I meant to, phone tucked away, coat damp at the edges, as I let my eyes slowly adjust. That was one of those moments when seeing the world through photography is truly about attention and presence.

In that moment, something about photography felt essential. It felt like a reminder that looking carefully can be an act of resistance against speed. In addition, it pushes back against noise and the constant demand to move on too quickly.

That feeling returns with “Latitudes: Nuits Balnéaires” and François-Xavier Gbré, opening this January at the International Center of Photography. Once again, the exhibition arrives at a moment when the world feels unmoored. On the one hand, borders harden; on the other, they dissolve simultaneously. At the same time, information travels faster than understanding, while history itself seems to be rewritten in real time. Within this atmosphere, the show does not attempt to shout its relevance. Instead, it sits with it.

A Moment That Calls for Attention

Developed as part of the Latitudes program by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and ICP, the exhibition brings together two artists whose practices are rooted in Côte d’Ivoire. Still, their work nevertheless speaks directly to our shared global condition. In this sense, the works presented here are not photography as spectacle, nor diagnosis or report. Instead, they reveal the photographic medium as reflection, as witness, something intentionally unresolved.

Inherited Structures, Unstable Grounds

François-Xavier Gbré’s Radio Ballast follows a railway line running north to south through Côte d’Ivoire, originally built during the French colonial era to extract resources and move them outward. Today, although the railway remains, its original purpose no longer does. Through his photographs of stations, tracks, and surrounding landscapes, Gbré reveals spaces marked by multiple layers of time: colonial ambition, post-independence optimism, and, finally, the quiet complexities of the present, as depicted by his unique approach to visual storytelling.

In a world increasingly grappling with aging infrastructure and inherited systems that no longer serve the lives moving through them, the work feels uncannily familiar. Gradually, the railway comes to function as a metaphor for the many structures we continue to inhabit without fully questioning them. These include economic systems, political frameworks, and narratives passed down and rarely examined. Significantly, the title Radio Ballast speaks directly to this instability. While ballast stabilizes railway tracks, the term also refers to rumor and contradictory information. In this way, history becomes both signal and static.

Importantly, Gbré’s photographs do not accuse. Instead, they observe. More quietly, they ask what remains when certainty erodes, and what continues to echo when power has moved on but left its imprint behind. With these images, the practice of photography becomes an act of careful questioning.

Between Borders, Memory, and Becoming

In contrast, Nuits Balnéaires Eboro approaches the present from another angle. Less grounded and more fluid, the work unfolds within an imagined space shaped by exile, migration, and unresolved loss. At its core, the project begins from a deeply personal point of departure: the death of the artist’s uncle, Noël X Ebony, a journalist, poet, and playwright whose engagement with African independence movements permeates the installation. Here, the past is not distant or fixed; instead, it remains active. It breathes in memory as captured through photography itself.

Set against the Gulf of Guinea, Eboro combines color-coded photographic sequences with a two-channel video installation. As the work unfolds, imagery moves continuously between intimacy and cinematic scale. Literature and fashion appear alongside digital culture, while ancestral memory coexists with online identity. Although the word Eboro translates as boundary or border, the work consistently resists fixed lines.

In a time when migration is increasingly politicized, displacement normalized, and belonging constantly renegotiated, Eboro feels less like a linear narrative and more like a state of being. In particular, it reflects a generation shaped as much by physical movement as by virtual proximity. It shows a life lived between places, screens, languages, and histories. Consequently, the future does not arrive as a complete vision. Instead, it appears in fragments, waiting to be assembled just as photography reveals fragments of the real.

Slowing the World Down

Taken together, these two bodies of work mirror the instability of the present without reducing it. As David Campany has noted, Côte d’Ivoire’s photographic scene spans conceptual documentary practices alongside hybrid blends of fact, remembrance, and fiction. Within this exhibition, these approaches are allowed to sit side by side. This acknowledges that truth today is rarely singular and never neutral, as shown so powerfully through the lens-based medium.

As one moves through ICP’s Latitudes exhibition, it becomes increasingly clear that photography is not being used here to explain the world, but rather to slow it down. It helps to ask what we carry forward, what we inherit without consent, and what we ultimately choose to remember or allow to fade. In an era saturated with images, these photographs insist on attention rather than consumption.

Photography as a Quiet Resistance

Finally, when I step back onto Ludlow Street after visiting ICP, the city feels louder again faster, less forgiving. Yet even then, something has shifted. A recalibration has taken place. The exhibition does not claim to offer solutions to the world we are living in. Instead, it offers a way of seeing it more honestly, and more patiently, as only thoughtful photography can inspire.

And perhaps this is its quiet power. In a moment defined by urgency and rupture, Latitudes reminds us that looking deeply is never passive. Rather, it is how we begin to understand where we stand, what has shaped us, and which paths we are still traveling even when the destination remains unclear. In this, photography continues to shape the way we witness, remember, and understand.