In an isolationist, door-slamming political moment it’s good to be reminded how cosmopolitan American culture has actually become. Evidence is there in “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging,” the 40th anniversary edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual group exhibition of current photo-based work. It’s a show you wouldn’t have dreamed of seeing — for sure, not at this museum — just a few decades back.
The 13 artists and collectives in this year’s selection comprise a continent-hopping cohort rooted in Mexico, Nepal (a nation currently in explosive turmoil), South Africa, and the United States. For these artists — all members of a planetary art world that not so long ago many of us never knew existed — photography doesn’t automatically mean an image confined to a frame, or a page, or a screen. It can be a mural, a sculpture, an installation. A photo isn’t just something you shoot and print; it’s also something you cut up, or soak, or sew.
We’ve long since acknowledged that photography has never been, as once assumed, an objective medium, a record of “reality.” Its view is always angled by historical circumstance, ideology, and emotion, with the perspective being, in the case of several of the artists in “Lines of Belonging,” from outsider cultures that historically stand, at a critical distance from dominant cultures.
Different kinds of lines — connective or dividing, tight or loose — weave through the show. They’re elaborately tangled in life-size photographs, taken by the two-person Mexico City collective named Lake Verea (Carla Verea Hernández and Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina), of decorative details from the city’s Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, a 1934 Art Deco building whose mélange of Aztec, Greek and Mayan motifs were likely intended to declare the museum’s proud internationalism, but now read as neocolonialist.
And they’re organically grounded in a sampling of digital photographs from the archives of the Nepal Picture Library (NPL), founded in Kathmandu in 2011 to document the country’s multicultural population.
The images chosen for the show are all from NPL’s “The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project” and focus on the subject of how feminism has been, and continues to be, received, in this South Asian nation. If progress on this front remains a struggle, a wall-filling photo of hundreds of Nepali women, all former bonded laborers gathered in what appears to be a protest, gives a sense of a building, dissenting energy, of a kind that erupted this week.
And there’s a more intimate call to resistance in a sculptural installation titled “Agony of the New Bed” by the Kathmandu-based artist Sheelasha Rajbhandari, co-curator of the first-ever Nepal Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Gendered injustices built into marriage is the subject of the MoMA piece: a platformed grid of gilt-painted miniature beds, all fitted with cotton mattresses, each mattress screen-printed with a photographic portrait of women — one is of the artist — and embroidered with texts, some bitter, some barbed, about the repressive conditions of wedlock within Nepali tradition.
The image of edge-to-edge beds suggests that sororal solidarity is possible and desirable. So does a series of half-length photographic portraits of unidentified women by the South African artist Gabrielle Goliath. Titled “Berenice,” the series is named for a childhood friend of the artist who was killed in 1991 in an incident of domestic violence. And each of the women (including the artist) who posed, mugshot-style against a neutral ground, serves as a vigilant stand-in for the dead woman, in an ongoing project that Goliath describes as a “lifework of mourning.”
Tributes to familial lines of descent also recur. It’s the substance of a beautiful wall piece by the South African documentary photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa. His extraordinary 2024 book titled “I carry Her photo with Me” was based on pictures he made or found while researching the fate of an older sister who had disappeared.
At MoMA, Sobekwa combines elements from that project with snapshots, written notes and scraps of legal documents related to other family members living and dead, to create a towering but fragile paper collage in the shape of a tree, by implication a family tree, and one that is, we are meant to infer still growing.
In a multimedia installation titled “New Orleans is the Spiritual Border to the Caribbean,” the American artist Gabrielle Garcia Steib similarly brings together written and visual ephemera, along with a video, to tell the story of her family’s move in the 1950s, as political refugees from Nicaragua and Mexico, to New Orleans, where she now lives. She knits into this history references to immigrants still coming to the post-Katrina city. And the fact that many of the family photos on view look half-ruined by water damage or rough handling hints at the toll such life journeys can take.
True, certain damage and loss is unavoidable through the inevitable wear-and-tear of time. The New Orleans-based artist L. Kasimu Harris has devoted himself to preserving evidence, through photography’s eternal-now, of a fast-vanishing subcultural creativity nurtured by Black-owned bars in the American South and beyond.
And some loss is the product of deliberate destruction. The New York City-born conceptual artist Renee Royale has taken Polaroid images of a stretch of land near New Orleans that was, in the 19th century, the site of a Black village called Fazendeville. In the mid-1960s, the neighborhood was razed to make way for the expansion of a park, with many residents moving to the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, an area of cheap rents that would be all but submerged by Hurricane Katrina.
In a gesture that feels like a tribute to Fazendeville, Royale submerged her Polaroids in Mississippi River water, let them stew in its algae, dirt and pollutants, then photographed the marinated prints for display. Two are in the show: from a distance, far from looking distressed and elegiac, they could be taken for washy abstract painting or shots of a pretty sunset. So much for photographic truth-telling, the pictures seem to say, a useful thought at a time when the call is out from the White House to make bad history look beautiful.
One of the show’s outstanding entries, though, and one that stretches the definition of photography furthest, projects genuinely positive vision, even if it’s only a fantasy. Using large-scale cutouts of photographed figures attached to a motorized metal frame, the Johannesburg artist Lebohang Kganye has staged a fictional narrative tableau about the return of the South African leader Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013, to earth.
In two-minute cycles, we watch a resurrection: Mandela’s figure rises before us, casting his shadow, immense, on the gallery walls, before sinking from view. With every reappearance a small figure rises too, with arms stretched out toward him. It’s a portrait of the artist.
Upbeat and fully reality-based is an L.G.B.T.Q. presence running throughout the exhibition, which has been organized by four MoMA curators: Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, Oluremi C. Onabanjo and Caitlin Ryan. That presence is tantalizingly hinted at in shots of rural weddings by Sabelo Mlangeni, who has done much to preserve a visual record of queer culture in South Africa and Nigeria. And it’s out and proud in the color pictures of Mexico City queer life by the artist Sandra Blow.
In a sense, there’s nothing at all novel or unusual about her images. They even look a bit ordinary seen in the context of New York. If the fact that they’re from Mexico (or Nepal or South Africa), and showing at the august MoMA, might have once been surprising. It certainly no longer is, thanks in large part to multiculturalist spadework begun during the 1980s.
Yet in a sense, the presence of these images — “documentation with glitter” as Blow calls them — at MoMA today is important in ways it hasn’t been for years. These works are evidence of histories and belongings that are now under serious political fire and they should, for that reason alone, be visible everywhere.
New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging
Opens Sept. 14 through Jan. 17, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400; moma.org.
Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.
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