The Museum of Modern Art 's "New Photography" show is the institution's annual state-of-the-medium address and, in many ways, a foretelling of what's to come. The eight young artists selected in MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci 's 28th-annual iteration of the show, open through January 6, venture beyond the mere capturing of images to incorporate elements of collage, sculpture, gesturalism, and commercial photographic practices.
Los Angeles musician-turned-artist Brendan Fowler offers the most explicit example of the convergence of sculpture and photography with his literal smashing together of framed photographs. Each piece compresses a secession of discrete, everyday snapshots into a single moment, and is titled after the season and a tabulation of the images contained within the work.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin continue to push their work into the third dimension with their recent appropriation of Bertolt Brecht 's 1955 photo-poem project War Primer . In the duo's update, the artists superimpose images from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sourced from a scattershot array of websites, atop copies of Brecht's original World War II-era tome.
Eileen Quinlan
follows in the found-abstraction tradition of artists like
Walead Beshty
, who is roughly the same age, with her recent series of photos of a yoga mat sculpted into geometric compositions. Quinlan previously worked for a
Clinique
cosmetics photographer and has cited the experience as formative in her understanding of the use of lights and gels.
German analog photographer Annette Kelm also draws from the realm of commercial photography to pose commonplace props against vivid backgrounds, which result in meticulously staged, perspective-bending still-life tableaux.
New York photographer Lisa Oppenheim seeks to add poetry to her process by conceiving of unusual and meaningful methods of developing her work. In the past she exposed a series of lunar-themed images to moonlight and, for this new suite at MoMA, she exposed pictures of bombs exploding during World War II to firelight.
The English conceptualist Josephine Pryde 's series of guinea pigs captured in varying states of contemplation at first appears to be a playful experiment in portraiture. But the work more darkly doubles as an exploration into issues such as animal testing, subjectivity and the male gaze.
Polish artist Anna Ostoya "pseudomorphs" complementary images to create unique new works, such as this shot of a teary model, originally taken by Modernist photographer Germaine Krull , and a still from Bas Jan Ader 's 1970 film I'm too sad to tell you .
