Why Does Salgado's New ICP Exhibit Make Comfy New Yorkers Nervous?

In Little Italy where I live there's an all-night store run by Chinese people. Outside the store stands a young Mexican man, in all hours and in all weather, working the flowers. He was there last January, without gloves in the freezing weather, trimming the tulips, bunching the irises, peeling the thorns off the imported roses so I wouldn't prick my finger. The flower man doesn't speak English or Chinese, and his bosses don't speak Spanish. He is there at his post every day, keeping the flowers. Like all the other immigrants around me who provide pleasant services?the Chinese food deliveryman, the busboys, the cab drivers, the faceless people who do my laundry after I drop it off?I don't know his name or anything about his personal history. I'm sure it's not too hard to guess at the broader details.

New Yorkers, who depend on low-wage immigrants for day-to-day living, usually don't pay very close attention to them. But every immigrant at some point made a decision to come here, often a desperate one. I was thinking of the flower man while looking at the latest exhibition at the International Center of Photography's newly revamped midtown gallery. "Migrations: Humanity in Transition" is Sebastião Salgado's sweeping 247-picture survey of migrants throughout the world. Salgado, who earned worldwide acclaim for his last monumental project, "Workers," documenting people who rely on hard manual labor to scratch out a living, spent seven years photographing the dispossessed. What he came back with are portraits of people who suffer in their lives so intensely that they will face any hardship to find some minimal improvement. Lucky ones, like the Mexican flower man on Prince St., might land a job in a big city, working the flowers. Others won't ever come close to such fortune. Some, like the Vietnamese boat refugees Salgado photographs in a Hong Kong prison, aren't so lucky. Those migrants have spent years in prison, in legal limbo. Their children grow up and go to school behind barbed wire in a relocation camp, as one heartbreaking picture shows. The migrants stay imprisoned until Hong Kong decides what to do with them.

The Salgado show marks the grand reopening of ICP's recently renovated gallery. There have been four other shows mounted there since the November 2000 unveiling, including one by Annie Leibovitz, but a blockbuster Salgado exhibition must be regarded as the real christening. The renovation added gallery space, and allowed for classrooms. The handiwork is attractive and created new amenities like a cafe (make a left at the pictures of the Rwandan prison), expanded toilet facilities (next to the room with the portraits of the children from refugee camps) and an enlarged bookstore and gift shop not far from the giant mural of Ecuadoran women carrying food on their heads.

Since its founding in 1974, the ICP has supported what is called "humanistic" photography, a catch-all name for documentary photography that depicts human suffering. But humanistic photography makes certain assumptions, not all of them comfortable. One is that the photographer takes pictures for an affluent audience: no one shoots pictures of coal miners for coal miners. Another is that the subject should be in some dire circumstance: poverty, dislocation, political oppression, disease, jail. Starving fellahin, conveniently, tend to be more photogenic than, say, a middle-class American wearing a J. Crew sweater.

Pictures of the poor can stir action on their subjects' behalf, especially in the United States. Around the turn of last century, Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, featuring photographs in the notorious slums of Mulberry Bend in what is now Chinatown. The book is credited with leading to the destruction of the tenements and the reform of housing laws. Walker Evans' and Dorothea Lange's pictures for the Farm Security Administration told the story of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. And the unforgettable images of the early civil rights demonstrations, like Bull Conner's goons firehosing protesters, built sympathy and stirred action for the movement.

But what are we supposed to make of these extraordinary photos on the wall?

Salgado, for all his celebrity and awards?he's won just about every one a photographer can?has been criticized, and not entirely unfairly, for turning powerless people into objects for the pleasure of the comfortable. Walking through the temperature- and humidity-controlled gallery to appreciate pictures of Afghani women gathering sticks of wood in the snow to keep warm is a weird way to spend an afternoon. Are these simply pretty, National Geographic pictures of exotic people? If they are, can we then conveniently forget about the hapless subjects after we leave ICP to go home?back to our deliverymen, laundrymen, cab drivers? Or do pictures like Salgado's intend to stir the viewer to action, something that only documentary photographers are asked to do? (Painters, musicians and dancers don't have marching orders to save the world.)

I walked away impressed as always by the photographer's epic sweep and sheer technical bravura. But the show is unsettling. Everyone knows that Third World conditions are wretched; here are the pictures that prove it. Am I supposed to be angry? Depressed? Motivated to write a check to Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), one of Salgado's favorite charities? I don't know. Still, it is to ICP's credit that they produce challenging shows with the thorns intact that make us think about people who are otherwise nameless, invisible and ignored.

"Migrations: Humanity in Transition," through Sept. 9 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 6th Ave. (43rd St.), 860-1777.