Are there too many images in the world? A new exhibition looking at our compulsive fascination with the proliferation of photographs, A TrillionSunsets: A Century of Image Overload, will be on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP) from January 28 through May 2, 2022. Curated by David Campany, ICP’s managing director of programs, A Trillion Sunsets explores mass media excess and image over-saturation through more than 50 works from the 1920s to today.

Among the photographs, books, and films on view in A Trillion Sunsets, including images from ICP’s collection, had works by Thomas, Nakeya Brown, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, Hannah H.ch, Justine Kurland, Louise Lawler, Barbara Morgan, Richard Prince, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Pacifico Silano, Sheida Soleimani, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, and Guanyu Xu.

The exhibition was be showcased in ICP’s downtown building at 79 Essex Street in New York, which opened in January 2020 and unites the museum and ICP’s school for first time in over 20 years. On view concurrently will be Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, which features photographs that are uncanny dimensional doubles for the objects they depict.

From picture scrapbooks to internet memes, to collage and image appropriation, to art made by algorithms, A Trillion Sunsets offers powerful insights and new perspectives on our long lovehate relationship with images, highlighting unlikely parallels and connections across decades.

With the rapid increase in illustrated magazines and newspapers in the 1920s, commentators began to ask whether society could survive the visual inundation. Since then, the art movements of Dada, Surrealism, Pop, Situationism, Conceptualism, and Postmodernism were all, in different ways, horrified and mesmerized by the seemingly endless image supply. Artists have cast a critical eye over the cliches, stereotypes, and repetitive pictures, and looked to unearth alternative histories and counter-narratives, re-presenting and reinterpreting forgotten images and archives.

“Have your way with images, or they will have their way with you,” says curator David Campany. “With this exhibition we explore very contemporary questions in the context of a rich and fascinating history.”