As is our tradition here at Collector Daily, as we return to photography after the winter holiday break, we take a quick summarizing look back at the previous year. At the top level, our total volume of reviews in each of our coverage categories was relatively similar to the numbers from the previous year, so some level of continuity or equilibrium seems to have been found from year to year, with museum and gallery reviews finding relative parity with photobook reviews.

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. 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.

As we have noted in these summary posts in the past, 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 teaches us is perhaps more elusive 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 proving to be 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 signals emerging from the photographic noise, highlighting what our specialized community found worth considering, sharing, and actively discussing in this past year.

Museums and Galleries (drawn from a total of 92 reviews)

1. Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen @Luhring Augustine (here)
2. Martine Gutierrez, ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS @Ryan Lee (here)
3. Candida Höfer, Heaven on Earth @Sean Kelly (here)
4. New Photography 2023 @MoMA (here)
5. Richard Avedon: MURALS @Met (here)
6. Alex Prager, Part Two: Run @Lehmann Maupin (here)
7. Sas Colby: Stamp Collecting @Stellarhighway (here)
8. Ahead of Her Time: Marcia Resnick @Deborah Bell (here)
9. Roe Ethridge, American Polychronic @Andrew Kreps and @Gagosian (here)
10. Wolfgang Tillmans, Fold Me @David Zwirner (here)

Photobooks (drawn from a total of 88 reviews)

1. Cesar Rodriguez, Montaña Roja (here)
2. Trent Parke, Monument (here)
3. Will Vogt, These Americans (here)
4. Jungjin Lee, Voice (here)
5. Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes (here)
6. Mariken Kramer, I hide myself within my flower (here)
7. Kikuji Kawada, Vortex (here)
8. Satoshi Tsuchiyama, Heat of Sand (here)
9. Viviane Sassen/Emanuele Coccia, Modern Alchemy (here)
10. Jonathan Castillo, Car Culture (here)

Art Fairs, Auctions, and Opinions (drawn from a total of 98 auction results, fair reports, and essays)

1. 2023 Guggenheim fellows in Photography (here)
2. Richard B. Woodward – An Appreciation (here)
3. Highlights from the 2023 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 1 of 2 (here)
4. Highlights from the 2023 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 2 of 2 (here)
5. Year in Review: Top 10 Highest Priced Photography Lots at Auction in 2022 (here)
6. Highlights from 2023 PHOTOFAIRS New York (here)
7. What’s New at Paris Photo 2023 (here)
8. Photography Highlights from the 2023 Frieze New York Art Fair (here)
9. Auction Results: Pier 24 Photography from the Pilara Family Foundation Evening Sale, May 1, 2023 @Sotheby’s (here)
10. Auction Results: Pier 24 Photography from the Pilara Family Foundation Day Sale, May 2, 2023 @Sotheby’s (here)

Reviews From Years Past

1. Daniel Arnold, Pickpocket (from 2022, here)
2. Peter Hujar, Love & Lust (from 2014, here)
3. 2022 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography (from 2022, here)
4. Baldwin Lee, Baldwin Lee (from 2022, here)
5. The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki @Museum of Sex (from 2018, here)
6. The Problem(s) with Fashion Photography (from 2018, here)
7. Richard Prince, New Portraits @Gagosian (from 2014, here)
8. Robert Frank, Good days Quiet (from 2019, here)
9. Michael Wesely, Stilleben 2001-2007 (from 2009, here)
10. Wing Shya/Tsuguya Inoue, Chaos (from 2021, here)

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