New York City -
Two terrific photography exhibits at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art demonstrate that the future of photography - or of anything, really - combines lessons, losses, and inspirations from both yesterday and today. The future always builds on the shoulders of giants, right?
“Time Travelers” from the Gayle Greenhill Collection presents an impressive array of images that thoughtfully captures the history of photography. The works are classics from legends William Henry Fox Talbot and Civil War’s Matthew Brady to street photography and let’s call it photography vérité practitioners such as Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Harry Callahan (no, not that one), Imogen Cunningham, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Man Ray, and Alfred Stieglitz. It was thrilling to see these mostly black-and-white images in one gallery.
The celebrated landscape photographer Emmit Gowan, inspired as he was by Callahan, Frank, and Stieglitz, once said that “For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another” and, I would add, across time. View these images at the MOMA and you come to understand the communication among subjects in an image or between subjects and photographer. More so, you also intuit the communication between photographer and viewer, perhaps somebody decades removed. Or how about the communication among all the photographers in the gallery through their works?
“The New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging” exhibit two floors below “Time Travelers” certainly picks up that generational dialogue among photographers and viewers alike. I was familiar with just about all the “Time Travelers” photographers but knew only one of the “New Photography” artists. Isn’t the whole idea not to get locked into just what you know and studied but to use that foundation to explore new ideas and approaches? I think so. Without this mindset, you can get old and stodgy pretty quickly.
This exhibit integrates 13 contemporary photographers and collectives from four cities - Johannesburg, Kathmandu, Mexico City, and New Orleans - in common themes from intergenerational dialogue to human interconnectedness itself.
Gabrielle Goliath’s 2022 images of Johannesburg women were extraordinary, set off as they are against a stark white backdrop. The women’s eyes are penetrating and their overall countenance formidable. So too is Tania Franco Klein’s 2022 subject studies in Mexico City.
Wait, is that a little Diane Arbus I see in Goliath’s and Klein’s work? Of course it is. That’s all part of the intergenerational dialogue.