MoMA's NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2012 Exhibition Begins Today, 10/3

The Museum of Modern Art presents the 27th annual New Photography exhibition, from today, October 3, 2012 through February 4, 2013, in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery.

This year, the exhibition features the work of New York-based MiChele Abeles, Shanghai-based collaborative Birdhead, New York-based Anne Collier, Los Angeles-based Zoe Crosher, and Zurich-based, Iranian-born Shirana Shahbazi, who each examine and expand the conventional definitions of photography. They challenge photography as a representational medium, explore the process of picture making, exploit the proliferation of images in a media-saturated world, and blur the lines between photography and other artistic disciplines. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography.

The five artists in New Photography 2012 have different working methods and pictorial modes, ranging from abstract to representational, but natural relationships among their separate bodies of work are revealed in the work shown here. Anne Collier and Zoe Crosher make pictures from other images in order to examine the ways that meaning and cultural values are embedded in photographs. The studio pictures of MiChele Abeles and Shirana Shahbazi are the result of processes involving collection, assembly, and in-camera manipulation. Birdhead's obsessive photographic chronicling resonates with Crosher's re-consideration of an existing archive. These connections, among many others, reveal the artists' common strategies and their individual approaches to related ideas.