What is it about any one photography review or report that helps it find its audience most successfully? It’s an inexact science to be sure, and if we knew the specific formula for delivering the most readers to our writing, we’d likely be using it to shape at least some of our coverage, so that our efforts might better match the interests of our readers. But the fact is, we don’t have the recipe, and so we cover what we think we should, and what we find worthy of further discussion and reflection, rather than simply trying to chase the clicks.

A few factors might seem to be likely contributors to broad readership: a famous artist, a well known venue or publisher, a show or book that is being talked about in the wider press, or perhaps even a controversy of some kind. We’ve also learned that the social media activities of any number of the participants (including the artists themselves, their galleries, museum press offices, publishers, art fair organizers, etc.) can quickly drive up the traffic numbers by sharing a review to their email list, adding a link to a CV, a website, or an Instagram post, or making some other mention of our writing to their own audience. And in terms of the timing of reading, that too is surprisingly mysterious – we might assume the traffic to spill in immediately after we publish a review, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes our once-every-two-weeks email newsletter provides a boost, as more intermittent readers catch up with what we’ve been writing, but in others it takes months for a review to catch hold, as evidenced by a few late 2024 photobook reviews that only really gathered steam this past year.

It has become something of a tradition here at Collector Daily to start the first week of the new year with a look back at the past twelve months, beginning with a tallying up of the most read reviews of the previous year. It’s honestly always something of an eye opener, as it’s often the case that there are reviews that we thought were particularly intriguing (or that we worked quite hard on) that seem to have puzzlingly fallen on deaf ears, while many others we might not have guessed could be so influential have jumped to the top of the rankings. In the lists below, we’ve captured the top ten reviews (ranked in order by readership) in various categories, and as we have explained in the past, please 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.

The hope is that these rankings might offer some insights into what our readers are most interested in that we might have otherwise missed. One standout data point comes from the New York street photographer Daniel Arnold – Blake Andrews’s review of Arnold’s excellent 2021 photobook Pickpocket was our most read photobook review of 2022, but what is quite a bit more surprising is that that very same review has been the most read older review in every year since (in 2023, 2024, and again this past year in 2025) – the readers just keep on coming. So if you have missed Arnold’s work in the past, the data says it’s time to catch up. Are there more discoveries like this below? Absolutely (including two reviews tantalizingly unearthed from all the way back in 2018), so dig through the rest of the lists to find your own missed connections and blind spots.

Museums and Galleries (drawn from a total of 78 reviews)

1. Andreas Gursky, Inherited Images @Sprüth Magers (here)
2. Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration @ICP (here)
3. Richard Misrach: CARGO @Pace (here)
4. Susan Meiselas, 44 Irving Street 1970-1971 @Higher Pictures (here)
5. Tyler Mitchell, Ghost Images @Gagosian (here)
6. New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging @MoMA (here)
7. Diane Arbus: Constellation @Park Avenue Armory (here)
8. Lee Friedlander, Christmas! @Deborah Bell (here)
9. Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans @Met (here)
10. Robert Calafiore, As My Eyes Open and You Disappear @CLAMP (here)

Photobooks (drawn from a total of 76 reviews)

1. Gerry Johansson, Maine (here)
2. Christian Patterson, Gong Co. (here)
3. David O’Mara, Setting Sun (here)
4. Daniel Case, Outside Sex (here)
5. Alec Soth, Advice for Young Artists (here)
6. Luigi Ghirri, Viaggi (here)
7. Eleonora Agostini, A Study on Waitressing (here)
8. Dona Ann McAdams, Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (here)
9. Gregory Halpern, King, Queen, Knave (here)
10. Cai Dongdong, Passing By Beijing (here)

Art Fairs, Auctions, and Opinions (drawn from a total of 78 auction results, fair reports, and essays)

1. 2025 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (here)
2. Year in Review: Top 10 Highest Priced Photography Lots at Auction in 2024 (here)
3. Every Booth at the 2025 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 1 of 2 (here)
4. Every Booth at the 2025 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 2 of 2 (here)
5. Discoveries Old and New at Paris Photo 2025, Part 1 of 5 (here)
6. Photography Highlights from the 2025 Frieze New York Art Fair (here)
7. Auction Results: Color Vision: Masterworks by William Eggleston from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, March 18, 2025 @Phillips (here)
8. Discoveries Old and New at Paris Photo 2025, Part 5 of 5 (here)
9. Auction Results: Photographs, April 17, 2025 @Christie’s (online) (here)
10. Discoveries Old and New at Paris Photo 2025, Part 2 of 5 (here)

Reviews From Years Past

1. Daniel Arnold, Pickpocket (from 2022, here)
2. 2020 Vision: Photographs 1840s-1860s @Met (from 2020, here)
3. Auction Results: Photographs & Helmut Newton: Provocateur, May 16, 2024 @Phillips London (from 2024, here)
4. Flash: Photographs by Harold Edgerton from the Whitney’s Collection @Whitney (from 2018, here)
5. 2024 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (from 2024, here)
6. Alice Hawkins, Dear Dolly (from 2023, here)
7. Daniel Shea, 43-35 10th Street (from 2018, here)
8. Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography, ed. Karen Hellman and Carolyn Peter (from 2024, here)
9. Melissa Catanese, Fever Field (from 2024, here)
10. Anders Petersen, Napoli (from 2024, here)

And for historical context, the most read reviews from prior years can be found here (2024), here (2023), here (2022), here (2021), here (2020), here (2019), here (2018), here (2017), and here (2016).