New Photography 2023 Member Last Look, Sep 17 Now on view MoMA
- MoMA, Floor 2The Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium In our interconnected world, images are crucial. No longer solely a means of recording our surroundings, pictures have become a prism through which our experiences are made and shared. New Photography 2023: Kelani Abass, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Yagazie Emezi, Amanda Iheme, Abraham Oghobase, Karl Ohiri, Logo Oluwamuyiwa explores the work of seven artists who explore the image as a social medium, and are united by their critical use of photographic forms.
Initiating the next phase in MoMA’s celebrated series, New Photography 2023 is the first to focus on a specific art scene across the globe. Each of the international artists in the exhibition maintains a connection to the vibrant art community flourishing in the port city of Lagos (Èkó)—commercial capital of Nigeria, and one of the most populous cities on the African continent. These artists challenge the notion of the photograph as document, and mine photography’s rich history and variety to make space for new perceptions and encounters. Some take scenes of everyday life as their subject, rendering them anew through formal experimentation and poetic rumination, or by chronicling personal experience at the heart of collective political action. Others use photography to explore architecture, geographical sites, and historical figures.
Since 1985, the New Photography series has introduced work by more than 150 artists worldwide. This exhibition brings together artists at various stages in their careers, presenting the work of Kelani Abass (b. 1979), Akinbode Akinbiyi (b. 1946), Yagazie Emezi (b. 1989), Amanda Iheme (b. 1992), Abraham Oghobase (b. 1979), Karl Ohiri (b. 1983), and Logo Oluwamuyiwa (b. 1990) at MoMA for the first time.
Organized by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, with Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Curatorial Fellow, and Samuel Allen, MRC Fellow, Department of Photography.
This exhibition is part
of New Photography.In the 1980s, as more and more institutions and galleries became as interested in photography as they were in what was beginning to be referred to as “contemporary art,” the main channel for contemporary photography at MoMA was the New Photography exhibitions, made up primarily of noncollection works. The first such exhibition, organized by Szarkowski in 1985 and intended to be an annual event, featured work by Zeke Berman, Antonio Mendoza, Ross, and Michael Spano. Szarkowski hoped thus to place contemporary creation at the center of the department’s programming: “New Photography will occupy twice the space of our former one-man series, and will show three or four photographers whose work—individually and collectively—seems to represent the most interesting achievements of new photography.”
It has been a window on the Museum’s approach to photography, and it continues to be one of the very few regularly occurring contemporary series at the Museum. To date the series has presented more than a hundred artists, divided almost equally between Americans and non-Americans and covering a broad photographic range according to the different sensibilities of various curators. Many of the photographers and artists represented in this volume were first shown at MoMA in a New Photography exhibition, which also provided the occasion for their first works to be acquired by the Museum. The series has encompassed framed prints, images on screens, commercial books, self-published books, zines, posters, photo-based installations and videos, and site-specific works, and it will continue to present all the different forms that the photographic image can take.
– Quentin Bajac, “Contemporary Photography at MoMA,” in Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now
MoMA Museum
