‘New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging’ at MoMA

MoMA unveils New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, on view through January 17th, 2026, marking the 40th anniversary of the museum’s influential photography series. This photography exhibition brings together 13 international artists and collectives whose work investigates how communities form, fracture, and endure across continents. Set across four key cities—Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City—the show positions photography as a vital tool for exploring memory, place, and the lingering effects of political histories. 

Rather than treating photographs as fixed documents, the exhibition presents them as living materials shaped by care, slowness, and collective storytelling. One of the highlights is a poetic short film by Gabrielle Garcia Steib, in which Super 8 footage merges with archival fragments to examine inherited memory and personal displacement. Another standout project comes from the Nepal Picture Library, whose feminist archive reflects on how private stories become public acts of resistance. Johannesburg-based artist Gabrielle Goliath contributes a meditative grid of portraits that suggests healing is a repetitive, ongoing gesture rather than a finite conclusion.

Exploring photography and identity

At the core of New Photography 2025 is an inquiry into photography and identity—how images define belonging and how artists reclaim authorship of their own narratives. L. Kasimu Harris’s series on New Orleans’s vanishing Black social spaces blends celebration with quiet mourning as he documents culturally essential gathering sites under threat. In a contrasting register, Sheelasha Rajbhandari transforms photographic textiles into sculptural beds that hold memories of family, tradition, and domestic constraint. Lebohang Kganye, working from Johannesburg, continues to merge personal archives with theatrical staging, constructing layered visual worlds where past and present overlap. Across the exhibition, photography dissolves into film, textile, installation, and performance, expanding the medium’s boundaries. The result is a portrait of global belonging told not through borders but through shared emotional terrains. Together, the artists propose photography as a collective language—one capable of stitching fractured histories into new forms of connection.