The International Center of Photography is a museum, a school and a center for photographers and photography. ICP's mission is to present photography's vital and central place in contemporary culture, and to lead in interpretation issues central to its development. ICP celebrates photography's diversity in many roles: as an agent of social change, a medium of aesthetic expression, a tool for scientific or historical research, and a repository for personal experience and memory.  Like the changing photographic medium itself, ICP's mission isexpanding to encompass the new electronic imaging media which will shape the twenty-first century just as photography did the twentieth.

ICP was established in 1974 by photojournalist Cornell Capa as an outgrowth of the International Fund for Concerned Photography, a small non-profit organization. The fund acted as a 'floating museum,' mounting exhibitions at various art institutions in New York and abroad.  The Fund was dedicated to the idea of socially engaged photographic reportage, and to the memories of four photojournalists who had died in the pursuit of their work: Robert Capa (Cornell Capa's brother), Werner Bischof, David Seymour ("Chim") and Dan Weiner.  The Fund's success prompted it to secure a permanent location at 1130 Fifth Avenue. In 1985, the new museum expanded to open ICP Midtown at 45th Street.  ICP Midtown moved to its present larger location at 1133 Avenue of the Americas in 1989.  From the start, ICP has been a school as well as a museum, offering instruction in photography at all levels and holding a collection of approximately 45,000 photographic prints. In all of its programs, ICP seeks to provide a public forum for the exchange of ideas and dissemination of information about the photographic medium.

ICP's Archives and Collections have as their mission the preservation, interpretation, and exhibition of significant images of 20th Century photography. The primary emphasis of the Museum's holdings is photojournalism and documentary photography. This is in keeping with ICP's belief in the power of the still image to record and interpret history. In order to represent the evolution of documentary photography the museum continues to acquire concentrated bodies of work by major figures who have contributed to the development and advancement of this tradition. ICP's major archival holdings include the Robert and Cornell Capa Collections, the Roman Vishniac, and Weegee (Arthur Fellig) Archives and Collections.