Photography’s

Next

Generation,

Bursting

Out

of

the

Frames

In an isolationist, door-slamming political moment it’s good to be reminded how cosmopolitan American culture has actually become. Evidence is there in “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging,” the 40th anniversary edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual group exhibition of current photo-based work. It’s a show you wouldn’t have dreamed of seeing — for sure, not at this museum — just a few decades back. The 13 artists and collectives in this year’s selection comprise a continent-hopping cohort rooted in Mexico, Nepal (a nation currently in explosive turmoil), South Africa, and the United States. For these artists — all members of a planetary art world that not so long ago many of us never knew existed — photography doesn’t automatically mean an image confined to a frame, or a page, or a screen. It can be a mural, a sculpture, an installation. A photo isn’t just something you shoot and print; it’s also something you cut up, or soak, or sew. We’ve long since acknowledged that photography has never been, as once assumed, an objective medium, a record of “reality.” Its view is always angled by historical circumstance, ideology, and emotion, with the perspective being, in the case of several of the artists in “Lines of Belonging,” from outsider cultures that historically stand, at a critical distance from dominant cultures.