MoMA’s "New Photography 2009" Showcases

Artists That Push The Boundaries of Photography

Delaunay. © 2009 Sara VanDerBeek, image courtesy the artist and D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York.

New Photography 2009 opens at the Museum of Modern Art today. This year, the annual exhibition, which began in 1985, features six young artists who “question what it means to make a photograph in the twenty-first century.” New Photography has in the past served simply as a showcase for lesser known artists rather than as a thematic show attached to a strong curatorial statement. While this year’s exhibition is still a showcase for individual artists with diverse image-making processes, Eva Respini, a MoMA associate curator and the show’s organizer, pointed out that there are shared concerns connecting the work. Speaking to PDN during a walk-through of the show, Respini noted that each of the artists expand “the horizons and language” of photography, and create images in either a studio or darkroom—not by going out into the real world. Most of the artists “accumulate things to make something else,” Respini related. Their processes reference traditional photographic techniques and the role of photographs in society. In her introductory wall text, Respini writes that “most of the artists actively work in other disciplines, and their photographs relate to drawing, sculpture, video, and installation.” Though the show is called “New Photography,” it seems sure to inspire some debate as to how far photography can be pushed before it becomes another medium. Walead Beshty creates massive, colorful photograms by repeatedly exposing a sheet of photographic paper in a chemical darkroom. Carter Mull photographs the Los Angeles Times and then utilizes “digital and analog techniques” to manipulate the original image and create subsequent, connected images. Sara VanDerBeek gathers together and arranges current and historical pictures and rephotographs them, exploring “the symbolism of individual images and the physical and cultural connections between them.” Leslie Hewitt, whose process is the most directly akin to traditional photographic practice, assembles objects to create still-lifes that resemble found scenes. Hewitt then orients the images upside down, questioning the representational value of photographs. Daniel Gordon creates pseudo-portraits by assembling cut paper and images into figures, which he then photographs and further manipulates. Sterling Ruby creates his images by digitally manipulating his own photographs as well as found images. Although the show does not attempt to sum up all the various ways artists are pushing the boundaries of photographic practice, it does highlight the various new tools that photography— especially in the transition from analog to digital—has made available to visual artists.