New Photography 2012 at MOMA

A group show at MOMA, entitled ‘New Photography 2012’ presents works by five artists, namely Birdhead (Ji Weiyu and Song Tao), Michele Abeles, Zoe Crosher, Shirana Shahbazi and Anne Collier. Their diverse backgrounds and varied techniques represent the depth and vitality of contemporary photography.

Cramped urban landscape

Shanghai-based duo Birdhead (Ji Weiyu, born 1980, and Song Tao, born 1979) captures the lived reality of their community against the urban landscape of Shanghai. Their mass accumulation of snapshots of friends and family eating, working, sleeping, and hanging out, speaks to a world of total image saturation and the obsessive documentation of the Facebook generation.

Technique of re-photography

Often created using a technique of re-photography, Anne Collier’s (American, born 1970) meticulous compositions are informed as much by West Coast Conceptual art practices as by product photography and advertising. Her dryly humorous pictures evoke formal and psychological associations that frame recurrent tensions of power and gender.

Questioning photography’s veracity

Zoe Crosher (American, born 1975) calls photography’s veracity into question by rearranging, re-photographing, and re-imagining the archive of Michelle duBois, an all-American girl who was devoted to relentless self-documentation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Shades of commercial photography

Drawing on the language of commercial photography, Shirana Shahbazi (German, born Iran 1974) approaches recognizable photographic genres like portraiture, still life, abstraction, and landscape with a distinctly analytical eye. She investigates the circulation and production of images today by outputting her pictures in multiple forms, from photographic wall murals to discrete photographs and photorealist paintings.

Still life and nude photography

Michele Abeles’s (American, born 1977) elegant studio constructions combine common objects, such as potted plants, printed fabrics, and wine bottles, with nude males whose bodies are often truncated by the frame, to create images that renegotiate the creative process of still life and nude photography.

Together, the talented photographers stand for the diverse permutations of the medium in a new era wherein its definition is continually changing.