New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is holding a major group show from July to February 2011 called Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography. As the name suggests (and like many things right now), it’s a game of two halves. The first part of the exhibition focuses on how photography was used in the 1960s and 70s by artists who had abandoned traditional art media, with Richard Long and Bruce Nauman, for example, using it to document their otherwise immaterial performances and walks. The second half looks at documentary photography of the 1980s and 90s, including work by Rineke Dijkstra, Doug Aitken and Weng Fen showing displaced refugees, aeroplanes and Chinese migrants.

Between these two halves, the Met’s associate curator of photography Douglas Eklund hopes to argue that this work evokes a sense of rootless and unfixed existence, which he believes to be more prevalent now than in the past. In particular, he argues that these artists sensed the retreat of local identities in the face of global corporatism, which started in the 1960s and 70s and dominated the 1980s and 90s. He sets the scene for each era, opening the 1960s and 70s section with a collage of the moon put together by NASA and the 1980s and 90s with a photograph of Robert F Kennedy talking to Ronald Regan via satellite TV.

It’s an intriguing idea, but I think I’d need to see the show in person to really understand how the two halves combine. After all there was plenty of documentary photography in the 1960s and 70s too, some of which specifically engaged with the question of place. The New Topographics exhibition in 1975, for example, gathered together both European and American photographers investigating landscape in the post-industrial world. Interestingly the introduction to the New Topographics referenced Ed Ruscha, whose work Eklund has also included in this show. It would be interesting to see the link between 1960s and 70s documentary photography and the work Eklund's focused on being teased out in more depth.

Still, he says the exhibition is deliberately discontinuous, and I haven’t actually seen it in person. For this show, it seems like you actually have to be there.