If you were to curate a photography exhibition presenting new work by artists who have never been shown or published before – beyond blogs, YouTube, and POD – where would you begin? When he answered that question five years ago, William A. Ewing, then director of Musee de l’Elysee, in Lausanne, Switzerland hoped to identify some of the stars of the future. “The schools provided the reservoir of talent,” Ewing said at the pre-opening panel discussion last Wednesday at Aperture Gallery. “More than 60 schools were selected worldwide, and each was asked to propose 10 candidates - students, or very recent graduates. We then selected the most accomplished and original work for reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow.”

As it happened, a number of the artists, including Pieter Hugo, Idris Khan and Natalie Czech, among others, have gone on to establish solid international careers. And the success of that exhibition’s international tour to ten cities, and the accompanying book and public programs, has made it part of the museum’s mission for keeping abreast of a rapidly changing medium. reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today is now on view at Aperture. The current edition was expanded to include 80 photographers from 120 schools.

Left: Jen Davis, Mike, Del Rio, TX, from the series, I Ask in Exchange, 2008. Right: Richard Kolker, Dinner, from the Series, Night, 2008. Courtesy Aperture Foundation.

Last Wednesday, Ewing and co-curator Nathalie Herschdorfer moderated a panel discussion with three of the photographers featured in the project. Among the questions the curators tackled was, “Would we see differences in the work presented here from that included five years ago?” They found that many of the same concerns prevail, such as the urban space, often devoid of human or natural content; globalizaton; the study of intimacy and identity; the speed and transitory nature of contemporary life and questions about how this effects people; and the skillful transition the photographers often make between analog and digital media, or between documentary and staged photography, as they travel from place to place. Ewing said that five years ago there was not a single “sublime landscape” among the selections – but this year the subject has re-emerged.

Benjamin Beker, born in Serbia and a student at London’s Royal College of Art, found that he could not come up with a subject in London. Although he feels that the city was the right place for him to be, it was only when he went back home that he could focus on his work, which, he said, came as quite a surprise. He photographed a series of war memorials, both in cities and in little towns and villages, many of them dating from the Soviet era. Isolated from their context, he says, the become “de-historicized.” The former icons of military might are now as ephemeral as flowers, and ultimately destined for the rubbish heap. Beker continues to reside in London and travels back to Serbia for the shooting side of his work.

Jennifer Osborne, a native of Vancouver, has found her subject matter both at home and abroad. In the course of photographing the fringe neighborhood of South Vancouver, which is peopled by drug hustlers, prostitutes and other outsiders, she realized that what fascinated her most was women living in hardship. She subsequently worked with Brazilian women who had just been released from a prison near Rio de Jeniero. Osborne said that by taking a job as a social worker in Vancouver, she was able to connect with people whose situations might be extreme enough to create too much distance between herself and her subjects.

Brooklyn-based Ted Partin, one of the fifty artists in the first edition of reGeneration, employs a street photography sensibility, which he says comes from an appreciation of photographers such as Garry Winogrand, but using an 8 x 10 camera. Working in collaboration with his subjects, he creates images that seem casually offhand but are as intently and intensely constructed by the subject as by the photographer. Recently he has begun using Cibachrome contact paper instead of black-and-white film, creating unique images in color. The prints, he says, have an incredible depth, which is not something that can be seen in the ground glass before the picture is made.

On Monday, January 31^st at 6:30 pm, Aperture will present a conversation between Jen Davis, an emerging American photographer best known for her frank and poignant self-portraits which pose a challenge to the standard photographic body type, and French philosopher Pierre Cassou-Noguès, whose philosophical argument echoes Jen Davis' work method, and her interest in representing the self. Davis is among the photographers included in reGeneration 2.

reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today continues at Aperture Gallery through March 17th. 547 West 27^th Street, 4^th floor, NY, NY. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautifully printed catalogue with over 200 images, and useful information about the reGeneration program, and art schools worldwide.