Given the eccentric ways that stories pass through social media and gather readers in spikes and bunches, aggregate traffic statistics are a complex and often confusing (or misleading) measure of raw popularity. Depending on the time of day, the day of the week, and the time of the year a review is published, and whether the stakeholders in question (artists, galleries, museums, publishers etc.) share the post with their own followers, certain reviews spread like wildfire while others stay closer to the core audience. Similarly, some reviews flash quickly in a day or two and then fade, while others seem to simmer on a slow burn, gathering readers over much longer periods of time. But for those who like a list, here are the reviews, articles, and essays that received the most traffic on Collector Daily in 2017, in ranked order by subject.
To be clear, these are not our editorial choices for some measure of “best” or “most important”, but simply the sums of the raw viewership data. More abstractly, perhaps we can think of these lists as signposts to what our community found noteworthy (and worth thinking about further) this past year.
Museums and Galleries (drawn from 136 reviews)
- Richard Mosse, Heat Maps @Jack Shainman (here)
- Ed Templeton, Amalgamated Fragments @Danziger (here)
- Photography in the Whitney Biennial 2017 @Whitney (here)
- Irving Penn: Centennial @Met (here)
- Roe Ethridge, American Spirit @Andrew Kreps (here)
- Meghann Riepenhoff, Littoral Drift @Yossi Milo (here)
- Thomas Albdorf, General View @Deli (here)
- The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel @MoMA (here)
- Jessica Eaton, Pictures for Women @Higher Pictures (here)
- Acts of Intimacy: The Erotic Gaze in Japanese Photography @Walther Collection (here)
Photobooks (drawn from 57 reviews)
- Masahisa Fukase, Afterword (here)
- Thomas Vandenberghe, Can’t Pay You to Disappear (here)
- Anne Schwalbe, There is a white horse in my garden (here)
- Laura El-Tantawy, Beyond Here Is Nothing (here)
- Photography at MoMA: 1920 to 1960 (here)
- Henry Wessel, Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide (here)
- Cole Barash, Smokejumpers (here)
- Peter van Agtmael, Buzzing at the Sill (here)
- (Other) Adventures of Pinocchio, ed. Lorenzo Tricoli (here)
- Zackary Canepari, Rex (here)
Art Fairs, Auctions, and Opinions (drawn from 136 previews/results, reports, and essays)
- 2017 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (here)
- Highlights from the 2017 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 2 of 3 (here)
- Highlights from the 2017 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 3 of 3 (here)
- Top 10 Highest Priced Photography Lots at Auction in 2016 (here)
- Highlights from the 2017 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 1 of 3 (here)
- Female Photographers at Paris Photo 2017, Part 1 of 5 (here)
- Photography Highlights from the 2017 Frieze New York Art Fair (here)
- Photography Highlights from the 2017 Armory Show (here)
- Female Photographers at Paris Photo 2017, Part 2 of 5 (here)
- Photography Highlights from NADA New York 2017 (here)