This exhibition, covering the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements -- with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art -- and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. 

The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." 

Bringing together over 250 works from MoMA's collection, the exhibition features major projects by Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Germaine Krull, Gerhard Ruhm, Helen Levitt, Daido Moriyama, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, and Walid Raad, among others. Photographic history is presented as a multivalent history of distinct "new visions," rooted in unconventional and innovative exercises that range from photograms and photomontages to experimental films and photobooks.

Pictured: Berenice Abbott. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Negative c. 1930/Distortion c. 1950. Gelatin silver print, 12 3/4 x 10 1/8″ (32.6 x 25.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler © 2012 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics

Venue Description: MoMA's rich and varied collection constitutes one of the most comprehensive and panoramic views into modern art in the world, and has grown to include over 135,000 paintings, prints, photographs, drawings, sculptures, films, and design objects. Visitors to New York City should make sure to stop in and view the collection during their vacations. Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world. Central to The Museum of Modern Art's mission is the encouragement of an ever-deeper understanding and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art by the diverse local, national, and international audiences that it serves. The Museum of Modern Art seeks to create a dialogue between the established and the experimental, the past and the present, in an environment that is responsive to the issues of modern and contemporary art, while being accessible to a public that ranges from scholars to young children. MoMA also has three restaurants on the premises: Café 2, is the museum's sophisticated cafeteria; Terrace 5 is a full-service café where guests can indulge in creative savory selections, delectable pastries and ice cream sundaes, inventive specialty cocktails, micro-brewed beers, and carefully selected wines; and The Modern offers the original, Alsatian-inspired cuisine of Chef Gabriel Kreuther, recently awarded three stars by The New York Times.

Museum Hours: Tues.-Mon., 10:30am-5:30pm; Fri., 10:30am-8pm (free entry 4-8pm for Target Free Friday Nights).

Upcoming Events at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA):

• Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth - 02/17/13 - 06/24/13
  
• Applied Design - 03/01/13 - 01/31/14
  
• Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light - 03/06/13 - 08/12/13
  
• Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light - 03/10/13 - 06/24/13
  
• Abstract Generation: Now in Print - 03/15/13 - 06/24/13
  
• A Trip from Here to There - 03/15/13 - 07/30/13
  
• Hand Signals: Digits, Fists, and Talons - 04/05/13 - 09/08/13
  
• Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store - 04/14/13 - 08/05/13
  
• Please Come to the Show, Part I (1960-1980) - 05/08/13 - 07/15/13
  
• XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography - 05/10/13 - 01/06/14
  
• Projects 100: Akram Zaatari - 05/11/13 - 09/23/13
  
• MoMA Studio: Exchange Cafe - 05/24/13 - 06/30/13
  
• Ellsworth Kelly: The Chatham Series - 05/25/13 - 09/08/13
  
• Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes - 06/15/13 - 09/23/13