The New Photography exhibition series, initiated in 1985, introduces critical ideas in contemporary art. This edition presents recent works by eight international artists who have redefined photography as a medium of experimentation and intellectual inquiry. Their porous practices—grounded in photography books, mass media, photomontage, music, film, and science—mark a shift in the understanding of what a picture can be. Photography, in this expanded discursive field, stands in as-yet-unmapped relations to other artistic disciplines. These relations contribute to the content of images—images that may document, invent, interpret, or involve sustained transformations of their subjects. Underscoring the idea that there has never been just one type of photography, the artists in this exhibition explore dialectical reversals between abstraction and representation, documentary and conceptual processes, the uniquely handmade and the mechanically reproducible, and analog and digital techniques. They thus turn pictures into questions, creatively reassessing the meaning of image-making today.
The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.
Major support for the exhibition is provided by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley.
Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.