The New City: Sub/urbia in Recent Photography brings together photographs that employ devices as diverse as street photography, digital manipulation, and photonarrative to explore the shifting face and texture of America’s parking lots, storefronts, and residences. The exhibition is curated by Whitney senior curatorial assistant Tina Kukielski.

The impulse to document the changing character of our cultural and architectural landscape has been evident in American photography throughout the history of the medium. Particularly since the 1970s artists have captured this country’s epicenters and borderlands, in exploration of the banalities and idiosyncrasies of urban and suburban space.

Characteristics of the uncanny emerge, evoking impossible and even thrilling visions of our surroundings, as in the case of the digitally manipulated photograph of two suburban Los Angeles homes by Amir Zaki, or in Walead Beshty’s eerie day-for-night double photograph of a failed utopian community. While some artists play with the photograph’s sense of truth, others remind us that what seems fictitious can in fact convey reality. For artist Michael Vahrenwald, it is the unaltered glow of floodlit parking lots bordering suburban commercial architecture that creates the enigmatic aura of his landscapes.

Elements of the vernacular appear consistently in these works, as in Zoe Leonard’s series Analogue, which focuses on the abandonment and atrophy of the decaying storefronts of New York City’s mom-and-pop shops. In Tim Davis’s series, Retail, the reflections of corporate logos in modest suburban home windows reveal the effect of commercial culture on our private lives.

The exhibition also includes works by Gregory Crewdson, Corin Hewitt, Karin Apollonia Müller, and Catherine Opie.