Over four decades, MoMA’s New Photography series has stood as a cultural marker for the evolving language of the photographic image. This year’s edition, New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, commemorates its 40th anniversary with a bold, sweeping vision that unites 13 artists and collectives from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Together, they present a redefinition of photography – not merely as an act of observation, but as an instrument of community, memory, and transformation. Curated by Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, and Caitlin Ryan, the exhibition asserts that photography today does not stand apart from the social world but operates within it, shaping the very conditions of how we see and connect. In doing so, MoMA brings the medium into a new conceptual space, one where art becomes a binding force in a fractured global landscape.
Since its inception in 1985, New Photography has served as a platform for artists who push the boundaries of the medium, from conceptual experimentation to social documentary. This year’s edition reflects a crucial curatorial shift, one that embraces photography’s capacity to bind rather than separate, to invite audiences into a conversation rather than simply confront them with images. As Marcoci notes, “The 40th anniversary of the program offers an opportunity for curatorial reflection on creative expressions of kinship and solidarity in a tumultuous political moment, centering artists who sustain communities, and drawing out connective threads within, across, and beyond the idea of borders.” That ambition is evident in the geographical scope of the show: four cities that are not only artistic capitals but living archives of migration, resilience and renewal. By highlighting these cultural nodes, the exhibition decentralises photographic discourse and offers a counterpoint to the dominance of Western art institutions.
Gabrielle Goliath’s Berenice 29–39 (2022) is emblematic of this shift in perspective. Her iterative series of portraits explores the intersections of grief, memory, and resilience, each image a quiet invocation of care. Goliath’s work is neither detached nor clinical; it is insistently human, a refusal to let photography be reduced to visual consumption alone. Similarly, the Nepal Picture Library’s The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project brings forward a living archive of Nepali women’s stories, reanimating photographs that might otherwise have been confined to obscurity. In this context, the archive is a dynamic space of reparation and a reminder that photography can be both a document and an act of reclamation.
Equally resonant is the work of Gabrielle Garcia Steib, whose installations translate personal histories of migration between Latin America and the southern United States into moving-image collages and tactile assemblages. By transforming family archives into new visual languages, she reframes private memory as a form of public dialogue. Sandra Blow, meanwhile, captures the vibrancy of Mexico City’s LGBTQ+ youth culture in a series of photographs that are celebratory without being naïve, presenting identity as both performance and defiance. Her imagery aligns her with contemporary figures like Wolfgang Tillmans and Zanele Muholi, artists who similarly dismantle the distinction between documentary and affirmation. Across these practices, there is a shared belief that photography can hold space for both intimacy and resistance, for moments of radical visibility and quiet reflection alike.
The exhibition’s spatial design reinforces this interconnected ethos. Rather than arranging the works in a rigid, linear sequence, MoMA has chosen a networked approach that allows images to speak across thematic and geographic lines. Prasiit Sthapit’s lyrical studies of Kathmandu’s urban transformations converse seamlessly with Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s photographs of Johannesburg’s shifting social margins, drawing out parallels between cities separated by continents yet bound by shared questions of belonging. Similarly, Lebohang Kganye’s photo-collages – where ancestral presences are woven into contemporary South African landscapes – evoke an uncanny dialogue with Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey, both of whom have long examined the intersections of history, place and personal narrative. The exhibition rejects simple categorisations and invites viewers into an expanded, non-linear field of photographic meaning.
This approach feels especially urgent in an era when photography has been absorbed into the accelerated churn of digital culture. Here, the exhibition’s insistence on slowness is its most radical gesture. By foregrounding practices that resist instant consumption, Lines of Belonging demands a deeper engagement with the image, one that privileges context, history, and relationality. Artists like Lake Verea, whose collaborative practice disassembles and reimagines architectural portraiture, and Renee Royale, whose transnational approach unsettles fixed notions of identity, embody this ethos of deliberate looking. Their works remind us that photography’s power lies not in its capacity for speed, but in its ability to hold our attention and reconfigure how we inhabit the visual world.
Beyond the galleries, MoMA extends the exhibition’s dialogic framework into a robust public program, including forums, artist talks, and screenings. These are not ancillary additions but integral components, transforming the museum into a space of encounter rather than passive observation. This emphasis on conversation and exchange underscores the exhibition’s conviction that photography is not only a cultural object but a living practice. It thrives not in isolation but in the friction and overlap between multiple voices, visions, and histories. Lines of Belonging offers more than a survey of contemporary photography – it presents a working model of how the medium can function as an infrastructure for solidarity.
Ultimately, New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging is not content to look backward, even as it marks a milestone. Instead, it sets its gaze firmly on the future, proposing that the evolution of photography will be collective rather than singular. It rejects the myth of the lone photographic genius in favour of a chorus of practitioners whose works are grounded in community, kinship, and care. For audiences, the result is an exhibition that feels both rigorously intellectual and profoundly human, inviting us not only to see differently but to live differently in relation to the images around us. In celebrating this 40-year legacy, MoMA does more than honour its past – it reimagines what comes next for photography, and for us all.
New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at is MoMA, New York until 17 January: moma.org
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
1. Tania Franco Klein. Mirrored Table, Person (Subject #14)from Subject Studies: Chapter 1. 2022. Inkjet print. 29 1/2 × 39 1/2″ (74.9 × 100.3 cm). © 2025 Tania Franco Klein. Courtesy the artist.
2. Gabrielle Goliath. Berenice 29–39 (detail). Eleven inkjet prints. Each 35 7/16 × 35 7/16″ (90 × 90 cm). © 2025 Gabrielle Goliath. Photo: Martin Parsekian.
3. L. Kasimu Harris. “King” Joe Lindsey and his Royal Setup (Roberton’s Vieux Carre Lounge), New Orleans from Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges. 2022. Inkjet print. 24 x 36” (61 x 91.4 cm). © 2025 L. Kasimu Harris. Courtesy the artist.
4. Saraswati Rai Collection / Nepal Picture Library. A mass meeting of former kamlaris (women bonded labourers) in Kanchanpur, Nepal (2010) from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project. 2023. Digital Image. Courtesy GEFONT Collection / Nepal Picture Library.
