Risking Life and Lens: A Photographic Memoir by Helen M. Stummer

6th Floor

For nearly forty years, Helen M. Stummer has chronicled urban communities affected by economic hardship in New York and New Jersey. Working in the tradition of social documentary—which Cornell Capa, ICP’s founder, termed “concerned photography”—Stummer focused on specific neighborhoods, blocks, buildings, and families over many years. Her intimate, poetic, and powerful images tell the stories of her subjects with compassion and real knowledge of their circumstances.

This exhibition, which was organized by Africia Heiderhoff, coincides with the publication of Stummer’s new book, Risking Life and Lens: A Photographic Memoir.