PHILIP MONTGOMERY
AMERICAN CYCLES

The works by Mexican-American documentary photographer Philip Montgomery (b. 1988) are distinguished by a palpable tension between the timelessness of his dramatic visual language and the urgent contemporaneity of the America he portrays. AMERICAN CYCLES marks the artist's first major institutional solo exhibition worldwide.

The exhibition offers a unique insight into a decade shaped by profound social and political upheaval. In addition to acclaimed stories, originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, the exhibition presents, for the first time, previously unpublished photographs as well as Montgomery’s latest independent projects.

Montgomery’s photographs trace contemporary tensions and emergent alliances, capturing moments such as the populist election campaign of Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement in response to systemic racism and police violence, and families displaced by ecological and economic crises. The exhibition offers a unique insight into a decade of American history marked by profound social and political upheaval. Despite such deep-rooted – and, often, deliberately inflamed – conflicts, Montgomery asks how we might exist in solidarity with those perceived as the ‘other’.

Reflecting the ‘American Dream’ in its full complexity – with its fissures, traumas and divisions – his photographic protagonists fight for their aspirations and visions, striving to escape the vortex of contemporary life. Montgomery’s imagery enters into a transhistorical dialogue with the history of photography – and makes for it a new iconography: like a pop-cultural and photo-historical index, his images evoke both the cinematographic traditions of Hollywood and the archives of the country’s socially engaged documentary photography.

For Montgomery, documentary photography is never synonymous with emotional restraint or ostensibly neutral gestures. He depicts the realities of contemporary American life through the use of flash, iconic visual compositions and moments that often seem almost impossible to capture – each constructing a simultaneous sense of emotive timelessness and specific urgency.

Curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Curator of the House of Photography, in close collaboration with Philip Montgomery.