Artists featured in New Photography consider and respond to the ways in which making and sharing photographs has shifted dramatically over the past two decades, and how those changes can lead to issues of access, privacy, and control of one’s image and story. By engaging with these concerns, Brown, Hovers, Lee, and Xu work to re-assert control over the photographic story through the creation, collection, or compilation of images. Unified by their understanding of the photograph as an ambiguous messenger, these photographers work both with and against new photography practices to trace stories about identity, community, and power. Whether interspersing magazine images with photographs of their own in ambitious installation images (Xu), embedding photographs within the museum’s architecture (Brown), appropriating and transforming sailing, landscape, and survival images (Lee), or interrogating the collection of images by surveillance cameras (Hovers), each of these artists considers how photographs, both found and made, and the spaces in which they are encountered interact to create new meaning.
New Photography is organized jointly by Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, and Brian Piper, Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Photographs.
“It is an honor to work with four such insightful photographers and to explore how their work signals an important shift in our understanding of photography,” said Lord.
“We hope that the ways in which these photographers weave together stories about their identities will inspire deep thinking about the language of photography,” said Piper.
New Photography is sponsored by the Del and Ginger Hall Photography Fund. Additional support is provided by George and Milly Denegre, John Abajian and Scott Simmons, the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment, and Delta Airlines.