New Photography 2025
Lines of Belonging
MoMA, New York
September 14, 2025 – January 17, 2026
Saloni and friends (2013)
from Change of Course. 2012-18
© 2025 Prasiit Sthapit. Courtesy the artist
River at Chalmette Battlefield (Fazendeville)
from Landscapes of Matter, 2023
© 2025 Renee Royale. Courtesy the artist
uMthimkhulu IV (The Great Tree). 2025
Installation with photographs, Japanese kozo paper,
gampi paper, colored pencil, oil pastel, acrylic paint,
and polymer photogravure
© 2025 Lindokuhle Sobekwa
The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, the 40th anniversary edition of MoMA’s celebrated New Photography series. This 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.
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
“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
Faith and Sakhi Moruping, Thembisa Township (2004)
from Isivumelwano, 2003-20
Gelatin silver print, 14 5/8 × 10 9/16″ (37.1 × 26.8 cm)
© 2025 Sabelo Mlangeni
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 says.
Clockwise from top left: Sandra Blow. Tony, 2018. Inkjet Print, 7 5/8 × 11 3/8″ (19.4 × 28.9 cm) © 2025 Sandra Blow; L. Kasimu Harris. Come Tuesday (Marwan Pleasant at Sportsman’s Corner), New Orleans, 2020. Inkjet Print, 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91 cm) © 2025 L. Kasimu Harris. Courtesy the artist; Saraswati Rai Collection / Nepal Picture Library. Print from digital archive. Courtesy GEFONT Collection / Nepal Picture Library; Sabelo Mlangeni, Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township, 2004. Gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 × 14 3/8″ (24.4 × 36.5 cm) © 2025 Sabelo Mlangeni
New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging
on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
from September 14, 2025, through January 17, 2026
Photo by Robert Gerhardt
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.
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
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.
Still from The Past is a Foreign Country. 2020
Super 8 and archival footage. 3 min. 19 sec.
© 2025 Gabrielle Garcia Steib. Courtesy the artist
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.
Berenice 29–39 (detail)
Eleven inkjet prints
Each 35 7/16 × 35 7/16″ (90 × 90 cm)
© 2025 Gabrielle Goliath. Photo: Martin Parsekian
New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging
on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
from September 14, 2025, through January 17, 2026
Photo by Robert Gerhardt
Johannesburg artist Gabrielle Goliath’s 2022 serial photographic work Berenice 29–39 is featured among other works that engage iterative modes of address.
Allan Balthazar (2017) from Untitled, 2017-20
Inkjet print, 43 1/4 × 28 13/16″ (109.9 × 73.2 cm)
© 2025 Sandra Blow
The exhibition concludes 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.
Untouched by the ancient caress of time, 2022
Installation view of Staging Memories,
the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/2022 winning project,
produced by Images Vevey (Switzerland)
and premiered at the Biennale Images Vevey 2022
Photo: Emilien Itim
Agony of the New Bed (detail), 2023
Thirty inkjet prints on linen, embroidery thread, metal thread,
glass beads, on 30 beds, wood, imitation gold leaf
Each 12 3/8 × 8 7/16 × 6 1/2″ (31.5 × 21.5 × 16.5 cm)
© 2025 Sheelasha Rajbhandari
New Photography 2025: 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 Hernández, b. 1978, live and work in Mexico City)
(Carla Verea Hernández and Francisca Rivero-Lake)
Hojas de Metal (Metal Leaves), 2019
Chromogenic print. 118 1/8 × 72″ (300 × 182.9 cm)
© 2025 Lake Verea. Courtesy the artists
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.
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