The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, the 40th anniversary edition of MoMA’s celebrated New Photography series. The exhibition brings together a group of 13 international artists and collectives, from four different cities around the world, who are expanding the horizons of the photographic field in the 21st century. Each at various stages in their careers, these artists are presenting distinct bodies of work for the first time in New York. Their creative contributions interweave personal narratives with structural, environmental, and colonial histories to consider forms of belonging that shape communities.
New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging is organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator and The David Dechman Senior Curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, and Caitlin Ryan, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography.
Since it was launched in 1985, New Photography has introduced MoMA audiences to the innovative practices of more than 150 international artists. The featured practitioners in New Photography 2025 work in and out of one of four cities that have existed as centers of life, creativity, and communion for longer than the nation states within which they are presently situated: Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City
“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,”
Roxana Marcoci
Organized across three gallery spaces, New Photography 2025 includes works by artists who variously explore the natural, manmade, and immaterial forms that shape communal lives and personal histories—from rivers to museums to family trees. Some reimagine the notion of the archive to formulate expressions of collectivity and interconnectedness, including a site-specific presentation of images preserved by the Nepal Picture Library, a digital archive. Titled The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, it brings visibility to Nepali women’s lived experiences. Transforming family archives into moving images and installation, New Orleans–based artist Gabrielle Garcia Steib explores personal and structural connections between Latin America and the southern United States. Others give space to tender and emancipatory possibilities of chosen families and social forms of kinship, positing a politics of everyday life that invites inclusiveness and resilience. Johannesburg artist Gabrielle Goliath’s 2022 serial photographic work Berenice 29–39 will be featured among other works that engage iterative modes of address. The exhibition will conclude with a group of photographs by artist Sandra Blow that celebrate the vibrancy of LGBTQ+ youth culture and artistry in Mexico City.
Engaging a shared set of concerns—from notions of intergenerational memory to the living nature of the archive and the transnational stakes of cultural expression—the artists of New Photography 2025 collectively offer persistence and care as a rejoinder to the viral and profit-driven speed of contemporary image culture.
Featured artists
Sandra Blow (b. 1990, lives and works in Mexico City) Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, lives and works in Johannesburg) L Kasimu Harris (b. 1978, lives and works in New Orleans) Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, lives and works in Johannesburg) Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990, lives and works in Mexico City)
Sheelasha Rajbhandari (b. 1988, lives and works in Kathmandu) Renee Royale (b. 1990, lives and works in New Orleans and Chicago) Nepal Picture Library (est. 2011, based in Kathmandu) Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980, lives and works in Johannesburg) Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995, lives and works in Johannesburg) Gabrielle Garcia Steib (b. 1994, lives and works in New Orleans) Prasiit Sthapit (b. 1988, lives and works in Kathmandu) Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake, b. 1973; Carla Verea, b. 1978, live and work in Mexico City)
New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, September 14th, 2025 – January 17, 2026 MoMA
PROGRAMMING: In conjunction with New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, a Forum on Contemporary Photography featuring contributions by the exhibition artists will be held on Monday, September 8th, 2025, from 4:15 to 6:15 p.m. in MoMA’s Celeste Bartos Theater.
