As is our tradition here at Collector Daily, as we return to photography after the holiday break, we take a quick summarizing look back at the previous year. With two years of pandemic disruption now at least somewhat behind us, balance was generally restored to our various coverage areas last year, with museum and gallery reviews regaining parity with the photobook reviews that had come to dominate during the lockdowns.

For those who like to analyze things by the numbers, here are the reviews, articles, and essays that received the most reader traffic on Collector Daily in the past year, 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 drawn directly from our analytics software.

It is certainly true that living artists do a better job of sharing reviews on social media than dead ones, and that some galleries, museums, and publishers are more active in pushing reviews out to their lists than others, so what the data reveals is perhaps more serendipitous than it might first appear. Why some reviews and subjects engage our audience while others fall away into the void remains surprisingly mysterious, with the relative fame of the photographer or venue in question an unreliable indicator of potential reader interest.

Perhaps we can best think of these lists, and some of the surprises (and omissions) that they contain, as somewhat cryptic signposts to what our particular knowledge community found worth considering, sharing, and actively discussing in this past year. At the bottom, we’ve included a new list of the older posts that readers continued to dig up, re-read, and re-discover this past year, as yet another elusive measure of interest.

Museums and Galleries (drawn from a total of 98 reviews)

1. Alec Soth, A Pound of Pictures @Sean Kelly (here)
2. Daniel Arnold, Nothing @Larrie (here)
3. Allen Frame, Whereupon @Gitterman (here)
4. Andreas Gursky @Gagosian (here)
5. Wijnanda Deroo: Behind the Walls of the Hermitage @Deborah Bell (here)
6. Bernd & Hilla Becher @Met (here)
7. Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice @Yossi Milo (here)
8. Keisha Scarville, Li/mb @Higher Pictures Generation (here)
9. Christopher Colville: A World on Fire @Rick Wester (here)
10. Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept @Whitney (here)

Photobooks (drawn from a total of 87 reviews)

1. Daniel Arnold, Pickpocket (here)
2. Curran Hatleberg, River’s Dream (here)
3. Terri Weifenbach, Cloud Physics (here)
4. Stacy Kranitz, As It Was Give(n) To Me (here)
5. Yelena Yemchuk, Odesa (here)
6. Robin Maddock, England!? les anglais ont débarqué! (here)
7. Baldwin Lee, Baldwin Lee (here)
8. Mike Mandel, Zone Eleven (here)
9. Sabiha Çimen, Hafiz (here)
10. Koji Kitagawa, Photography (here)

Art Fairs, Auctions, and Opinions (drawn from a total of 89 auction results, fair reports, and essays)

1. 2022 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (here)
2. Photography Highlights from Paris Photo 2022, Part 3 of 4 (here)
3. Photography Highlights from Paris Photo 2022, Part 1 of 4 (here)
4. Photography Highlights from Paris Photo 2022, Part 2 of 4 (here)
5. Year in Review: Top 10 Highest Priced Photography Lots at Auction in 2021 (here)
6. Photography Highlights from Paris Photo 2022, Part 4 of 4 (here)
7. Every Booth at the 2022 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 1 of 2 (here)
8. Every Booth at the 2022 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 2 of 2 (here)
9. Auction Results: Photographs, April 7, 2022 @Bonhams (here)
10. Photography Highlights from the 2022 Frieze New York Art Fair (here)

Reviews From Years Past

1. Peter Hujar, Love & Lust (from 2014, here)
2. The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki @Museum of Sex (from 2018, here)
3. 2021 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (from 2021, here)
4. The Problem(s) with Fashion Photography (from 2018, here)
5. John Yuyi, Airplane Mode (from 2021, here)
6. Robert Frank, Good days Quiet (from 2019, here)
7. Cammie Toloui, 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes (from 2021, here)
8. Farah Al Qasimi, Hello Future (from 2021, here)
9. Buck Ellison, Living Trust (from 2020, here)
10. Wing Shya/Tsuguya Inoue, Chaos (from 2021, here)

For historical context, the most read reviews from prior years can be found here (2021), here (2020), here (2019), here (2018), here (2017), and here (2016).