On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, MoMA’s longstanding exhibition series New Photography is expanding to 19 artists and artist collectives from 14 countries, and includes works made specifically for this exhibition.

Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 will be on view from November 7, 2015 to March 20, 2016, throughout the entirety of the Museum’s Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, The Agnes Gund Garden Lobby and the Museum’s Bauhaus Staircase.

This year’s edition explores contemporary photo-based culture, specifically focusing on connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and communication models.

Probing the effects of an image-based post-Internet reality, Ocean of Images examines various ways of experiencing the world: through images that are born digitally, made with scanners or lenses in the studio or the real world, presented as still or moving pictures, distributed as zines, morphed into three-dimensional objects, or remixed online.

The exhibition’s title refers to the Internet as a vortex of images, a site of piracy, and a system of networks, which is reflected in the work of the 19 included artists and collectives. Ocean of Images presents new and recent bodies of work that critically redefine photography as a field of experimentation and intellectual inquiry, where digital and analog, virtual and real dimensions cross over.

 

 

Coinciding with the opening of the exhibition, MoMA will also launch an online platform housing the live archive of the New Photography series, featuring documents and images from its history.

 

 

Featured artists are: Ilit Azoulay (Israeli, b. 1972), Zbyněk Baladrán (Czech, b. 1973), Lucas Blalock (American, b. 1978), Edson Chagas (Angolan, b. 1977), Natalie Czech (German, b. 1976), DIS (Collective, founded in New York in 2010), Katharina Gaenssler (German, b. 1974), David Hartt (Canadian, b. 1967), Mishka Henner (Belgian, b. 1976), David Horvitz (American, b. 1982), John Houck (American, b. 1977), Yuki Kimura (Japanese, b. 1971), Anouk Kruithof (Dutch, b. 1981), Basim Magdy (Egyptian, b. 1977), Katja Novitskova (Estonian, b. 1984), Marina Pinsky (Russian, b. 1986), Lele Saveri (Italian, b. 1980), Indrė Šerpytytė (Lithuanian, b. 1983), Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980).

 

New Photography 2015 at MoMA 
From November 7 to March 20, 2016
The Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd Street, New York 
www.moma.org

Our pal, the Italian artist Lele Saveri, based in New York, is participating with his installation The Newsstand. Contextually to the release of his latest publication Landscapes (Dashwood Books, 2015), we took the occasion to find out more about the book and his views upon photography.

 

F:     Nude is like self-portraiture for a photographer, sooner or later you end up exploring the subject. Is this your first time? 

LS:     This project actually started with a smaller publication, a zine I released a couple of years back. I am not very interested in sexy or erotic photography, this is probably as far as I would go with nudes.

F:    Along with the contents, in your work the techniques and materials you use are very important too, tell us more about this. 

LS:     The idea, as I said, came from a zine I released in 2012 with an Australian publisher (Heavy Mental) which does all its printings with a Risograph machine. Risograph is an old technic of printing, usually used by churches and schools for their leaflets. It only uses one color at the time, but you can play with it by adding more layers of colors – so you essentially divide the image into sections, and print one at the time in different colors. We wanted to keep the same aesthetic, without the “dirty feeling” that Risograph prints usually have. We experimented for months playing with colors and layers, then once we were happy with a selection of prints, we scanned them and printed the book off set.

F:     You are part of the New Photography 2015 exhibition at MoMA. With your project The Newsstand, you are not showing any of your pictures but books, fanzines and magazines by others. Where does your interest in photography lay? 

LS:     Personally, I am mostly interested in photography as an act of documenting, less and less as a way of earning money. The Newsstand on the other hand is a community project. Those to me are the most important things right now. We live in the first era of alternative egos and virtual personalities, so now more then ever there is a need of somewhere physical to encounter other real people and have discussions and interactions. Zines and self publications are by anyone and for anyone. I still love photography, but we are a little overwhelmed with it now, so I don’t really know what I feel about it anymore.

Lele Saveri, Landscapes 
120 pp., $ 30
Dashwood Books
www.dashwoodbooks.com