Milja Laurila’s inability to remember the time she spent living in Tanzania as a small child led her to explore the relationship between photography, memory, and identity—the way one can look at a photograph of oneself without recognition. In the series In Their Own Voice, Laurila asks what it means to be observed in different pictorial regimes. She transfers existing medical photographs of female subjects to transparent acrylic and groups them in horizontal arrangements.

In Because Every Hair Is Different, Marlene Haring explores hair as a powerful physical marker of femininity and desirability. Beginning with the idea that long, fine, blond tresses are the quintessence of feminine beauty and pushing it to an absurd extreme, Haring transforms herself into a surrealistic creature. Her gesture, at once performance, installation, and photography, complicates the link between hair and beauty: potentially, hair is also burdensome and grotesque, demanding an endless investment of time and money.

Alexandra Croitoru’s double portraits blend cynical humor and deadpan formality, mimicking standard compositions for such images. In each example, the man is seated and looks away from the camera, while the artist stands behind him, touching his shoulder and staring into the lens. Croitoru’s stereotypically masculine companions here are Adrian Năstase, prime minister of Romania at the time this work was made (who was later tried and imprisoned for corruption), and a bodybuilder who trained at her local gym.

Unless otherwise noted, all works are promised gifts of the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection. The collection comprises a total of 200 objects by eighty-one artists working in eighteen countries. The donation of this collection to LACMA and the Brooklyn Museum initiates a unique collaboration between the two museums. Over the next ten years, annual acquisitions will augment and diversify the collection, which will thus remain “in the now,” responsive to a changing world.