The relative quiet of the post-holiday time around New Year’s often provides just enough space to think about the past year with some degree of meditative calm. And so as we return to photography after our winter break, we start by looking backward for just a moment or two, summarizing some of our activities from the previous year and looking for larger patterns and insights that we might have missed during the usual everyday rush.

In 2024, we transitioned to a four publishing days a week schedule (with Mondays left fallow), which has altered the total volume of reviews in our coverage categories just a bit. Photobook reviews actually increased by a small amount in 2024 (over the previous year), which led to somewhat less museum and gallery reviews, simply due to the inevitable jockeying for open publication slots in our editorial calendar. That fight for space can be thought of as a natural sifting function, one that pushed a few less intriguing one star shows out of contention.

For those who like to analyze things statistically, below are the reviews, articles, and essays that received the most reader traffic on Collector Daily in the past year, in ranked order by subject. As we have explained in the past, do not mistake these lists for our editorial choices of some measure of “best” or “most important”; they are simply the sums of the raw viewership data drawn directly from our analytics software.

Why some reviews and subjects actively engage our audience (leading to sharing, arguing, and further discussion) while others seem to disappear without generating much of a ripple in the photographic pond remains surprisingly mysterious, with the relative fame of the photographer or venue in question proving to be an unreliable indicator of potential reader interest. It is abundantly clear however that much of our audience uses our once-every-two-weeks email newsletter as a helpful memory jogger, its drop on alternate Thursdays leading to a flurry of global reading and catching up.

In aggregate, might these rankings be telling us something unexpected or even insightful about what we collectively saw, valued, or returned to last year? Maybe, or maybe not, depending on where you sit; what they do offer are glimpses of a few more overlooked shows and books that managed, perhaps against the odds in our media saturated world, to successfully find an audience. So if you missed reading about any of these last year, now’s your chance to fill in the gaps in your 2024 photo-history:

Museums and Galleries (drawn from a total of 59 reviews)

1. Dag Alveng: Photographs from Telemark @Deborah Bell (here)
2. Cindy Sherman @Hauser & Wirth (here)
3. Erin O’Keefe, I saw the man with a telescope @Sargent’s Daughters (here)
4. An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières @MoMA (here)
5. Justine Kurland: This Train, 2005-2011 @Higher Pictures Generation (here)
6. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Optical Allusion @Lisson (here)
7. Mitch Epstein, Old Growth @Yancey Richardson (here)
8. Yamini Nayar, Ouroboros @Thomas Erben (here)
9. Sharp Cuts: Queer Collage @CLAMP (here)
10. Saul Leiter, Centennial @Howard Greenberg (here)

Photobooks (drawn from a total of 95 reviews)

1. Emin Özmen, Olay (here)
2. Alex Webb, Dislocations (here)
3. Nikita Teryoshin, Nothing Personal (here)
4. Mark Ruwedel, Rivers Run Through It (here)
5. Chris McCaw, Marking Time (here)
6. Mike Brodie, Polaroid Kid (here)
7. Sage Sohier, Passing Time (here)
8. Paul Kooiker, Fashion (here)
9. Clara DeWeese, For The Sake Of The Song (here)
10. Mario Giacomelli, Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare (here)

Art Fairs, Auctions, and Opinions (drawn from a total of 83 auction results, fair reports, and essays)

1. Auction Results: Photographs & Helmut Newton: Provocateur, May 16, 2024 @Phillips London (here)
2. 2024 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (here)
3. Highlights from the 2024 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 1 of 2 (here)
4. Year in Review: Top 10 Highest Priced Photography Lots at Auction in 2023 (here)
5. 21st Century Highlights from Paris Photo 2024, Part 1 of 6 (here)
6. Highlights from Photo London 2024 (here)
7. Highlights from the 2024 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 2 of 2 (here)
8. 21st Century Highlights from Paris Photo 2024, Part 6 of 6 (here)
9. Year in Review: 2023 Photobook Review Statistics (here)
10. Auction Results: The Collection of Sir Elton John: Opening Night and The Day Sale, February 21, 22, and 23, 2024 @Christie’s (here)

Reviews From Years Past

1. Daniel Arnold, Pickpocket (from 2022, here)
2. Omar Victor Diop X The Anonymous Project, Being There (from 2023, here)
3. 2023 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (from 2023, here)
4. Alice Hawkins, Dear Dolly (from 2023, here)
5. Trent Parke, Monument (from 2023, here)
6. Yurie Nagashima, Self-Portraits (from 2021, here)
7. Katerina Moschou, How to drive (from 2023, here)
8. Robert Frank, Good days Quiet (from 2019, here)
9. The Problem(s) with Fashion Photography (from 2018, here)
10. Charles Johnstone, In Search of the Perfect Palm: An Homage to Girault de Prangey (from 2023, here)

For historical context, the most read reviews from prior years can be found here (2023), here (2022), here (2021), here (2020), here (2019), here (2018), here (2017), and here (2016).