5 international photographers to keep on your radar
On view at MoMA, and hailing from the US to Nepal, they ‘use photography to connect within their communities and across nation-states’
By Janelle Zara
Launched in 1985, the ‘New Photography’ series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has showcased the groundbreaking work of more than 150 artists. For its 40th anniversary edition, the organizers were guided by ‘the radical potential of image-making as a mode of resistance and free imagination,’ says Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA.
‘New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging’ features 13 international artists and collectives from New Orleans, Mexico City, Kathmandu, and Johannesburg – four cities, according to the exhibition text, whose cultural history predates the official formation of their respective countries. The throughline that emerged was a spirit of collective solidarity, where photography served as a vehicle for bringing embattled communities together. Across these overlapping themes and commonalities, the artists present a striking range of technical and material approaches to photography. ‘It’s a kind of deeper understanding of how people use photography to connect within their communities and across nation-states,’ says Marcoci.
Rather than organize the exhibition along geographic lines, the curators installed a series of cross-cultural dialogues, where individual practices converged and diverged along themes of identity and kinship; biological and chosen families; the importance of ritual; the preservation of knowledge; and notions of care. Personal memories merge with collective ones, as artists use photography to connect their lived experiences with larger historical events.
Since its inaugural 1985 exhibition, the ‘New Photography’ series has embraced a relatively quick pace of curation, allowing each show to respond to urgent real-world events in real time. An obvious subject for this latest exhibition might have been the role of digital technologies in our image-saturated world. ‘We are all connected, obviously, through our iPhones and social platforms,’ says Marcoci, ‘but we decided not to focus on this kind of instant connectivity.’ (In fact, the 30th anniversary show, ‘Ocean of Images’, already covered ‘connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and communication models.’)
For ‘Lines of Belonging’, the curators turned away from the increasingly isolating digital world and focused on modes of connection predating the Internet, looking to communities that formed face-to-face in physical, sometimes private, spaces, and endured despite long histories of injustice.
Lake Verea
The exhibition opens with life-sized images of Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, shot by Lake Verea – the Queer conceptual artist duo Carla Verea Hernández and Francisca Rivero-Lake. Their architectural photography examines themes of cultural and political heritage as it appears in the built environment, zooming in on the surface details. Taken from their 2019 ‘Uno a Uno’ series, images of Art Deco flourishes, for example, present an amalgamation of both pre-Columbian and colonial European histories, both of which continue to shape Mexican national identity, art, and politics today.
Lebohang Kganye
Lebohang Kganye is a Johannesburg artist similarly interested in exploring her national history through photographs. Rather than shoot images, she mines personal and public archives, merging historical black-and-white photographs with whimsical elements of theater and children’s storybooks. Marcoci describes the artist’s kinetic installations as ‘photographic stage sets’ in which cutout figures representing pre- and post-apartheid South Africa cast layered shadows on the wall. ‘Her storytelling points to the fabricated nature of history, and of photography for that matter.’
Sandra Blow
For both Sandra Blow and L. Kasimu Harris, nightlife functions as an essential refuge for the disempowered. Blow’s stylized portraits of Queer youth in Mexico City focus on fashion as an expression of creativity and self-possession.
L. Kasimu Harris
In New Orleans, Harris captures the subjects of his ‘Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges’ more candidly, documenting the distinct textures and aesthetics of the city’s Black-owned establishments as gentrification poses the constant threat of extinction.
Sabelo Mlangeni
Marcoci points to Johannesburg-based Sabelo Mlangeni as one of a number of artists on view who ‘embrace and explore the idea of love as a political unifier.’ Mlangeni’s black-and-white images of Queer marriage and friendships in South Africa capture the solidarity of their respective communities in states of celebration, self-expression, and joy.
Credits and captions
Janelle Zara is a freelance writer specializing in art and architecture. She is the author of Masters at Work: Becoming an Architect (2019). She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Caption for header image: Saraswati Rai Collection and Nepal Picture Library, A mass meeting of former kamlaris (women bonded labourers) in Kanchanpur, Nepal (2010) from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, 2023. Courtesy of GEFONT Collection and Nepal Picture Library.
The exhibition will be on view at MoMA from September 14, 2025, through January 17, 2026.
Published on September 8, 2025.
