On a quiet afternoon in Midtown, I stepped into MoMA and into a space of unexpected tenderness. New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging—the 40th anniversary of the museum’s celebrated series—doesn’t overwhelm with spectacle. Instead, it whispers, it lingers. By the time I left at sunset, with the city glowing in pink and steel, I carried with me a sense that photography can still slow time, that it can hold memory against the rush of the world.

Curators Roxana Marcoci, Lucy Gallun, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, and Caitlin Ryan have shaped the exhibition with remarkable sensitivity. Organized across three gallery spaces, the design itself feels like an essay in pacing: quiet rooms that breathe, transitions that echo the idea of belonging across distance. Rather than forcing connections, the installation lets each artist’s voice resonate and then weave gently into the next. The result is a choreography of encounters—intimate, political, and deeply human.

This year’s edition gathers thirteen artists and collectives from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, Mexico City, and New Orleans—cities older than the nations that contain them, places where art and ritual have always outlived politics. Each artist brings to New York a body of work that interweaves personal narratives with structural histories: colonial, environmental, familial. Together, they offer not just images but forms of belonging.

Remembering, Resisting, Reimagining
In Kathmandu, the Nepal Picture Library turns the archive into protest with The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, a living record of voices once silenced. From Johannesburg, Lebohang Kganye stages theatrical worlds out of family photographs, while Gabrielle Goliath’s Berenice 29–39 becomes a litany of intimacy, repetition as refusal. In New Orleans, Gabrielle Garcia Steib animates her family’s archive into moving images, tracing hidden ties between Latin America and the American South. L. Kasimu Harris mourns and honors Black social spaces under threat, his portraits steeped in warmth before the wrecking ball arrives.

Mexico City closes the show in a burst of light and pulse: Sandra Blow’s photographs of queer youth, luminous with sweat, ink, and laughter. Here, belonging is not nostalgia but a future being born in real time.

Slowness Against Speed
What binds these artists is not aesthetic similarity but tempo. Against the viral churn of contemporary image culture, Lines of Belonging insists on slowing down: on intergenerational care, on communities that resist erasure, on photographs that circulate not for clicks but for survival.

Leaving the Museum
Stepping back into the street at dusk, I felt the city differently—its edges softer, its pace less brutal. This exhibition draws invisible lines across Johannesburg, Kathmandu, Mexico City, New Orleans, and New York, weaving them into one fabric. What remains is not only the gravity of histories, but the quiet radicalism of tenderness. At sunset, tenderness felt like the only light worth following.

Featured Artists
Sandra Blow (b. 1990, lives and works in Mexico City)
Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, lives and works in Johannesburg)
L. Kasimu Harris (b. 1978, lives and works in New Orleans)
Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, lives and works in Johannesburg)
Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990, lives and works in Mexico City)
Sheelasha Rajbhandari (b. 1988, lives and works in Kathmandu)
Renee Royale (b. 1990, lives and works in New Orleans and Chicago)
Nepal Picture Library (est. 2011, based in Kathmandu)
Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980, lives and works in Johannesburg)
Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995, lives and works in Johannesburg)
Gabrielle Garcia Steib (b. 1994, lives and works in New Orleans)
Prasiit Sthapit (b. 1988, lives and works in Kathmandu)
Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake, b. 1973; Carla Verea, b. 1978, live and work in Mexico City)

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging >>>
On View from September 14, 2025 – January 17, 2026
The Museum of Modern Art