Captivating Camera Chronicles: 7 Must-Visit Photography Exhibitions this Winter 2025

Rineke Dijkstra — Berlin

The Dutch visual artist Rineke Dijkstra is celebrated for her depictions of youth and individuals experiencing hardship or change—particularly bullfighters, club-goers, military trainees, and new mothers. Similar to Diane Arbus and August Sander, Dijkstra aims for an unbiased connection with her subjects, who meet her gaze with striking clarity. Her newest retrospective, mounted by the Berlinische Galerie, spans over thirty years of photography and video and solidifies her reputation as one of the preeminent portraitists working today. “Though my images primarily depict individual persons,” Dijkstra has remarked, “I desire them to resonate more broadly, serving as metaphors for a whole community.”

Rineke Dijkstra at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, through February 10, 2025

Letizia Battaglia — London

Letizia Battaglia passed away in the spring of 2022, in Cefalù, near Palermo, Sicily, where she made a significant impact as a courageous photographer documenting, at great personal danger, the mafia-related violence that afflicted the city. Her photographs depict a harrowing, bloody toll, illustrating the pain and heartbreak organized crime inflicted upon the residents. However, Battaglia—who was also active in city governance and a passionate advocate—provided a broader perspective of the city’s social landscape, ranging from gatherings for aristocracy to the vibrant chaos of urban life.

Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, through February 23, 2025

Louis Carlos Bernal — Tucson

Born in Arizona, Louis Carlos Bernal began his artistic journey in the 1970s, during a time when the Chicano civil rights movement invigorated a generation of Mexican Americans. Bernal’s venerated photographs of residences in Tucson’s historic neighborhoods depict family portraits, television sets, film posters, and religious altars with remarkable attention to detail and color. “He perceived his artistic role as a form of moral obligation, to voice his community’s experiences and to serve as a connector, promoting his heritage to a broader audience,” notes Elizabeth Ferrer, curator of Bernal’s long-anticipated career retrospective. Bernal’s portraits illustrate la vida cotidiana—ordinary life—as a celebration of grace.

Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, through March 15, 2025

An-My Lê — New York

“My connection to the concept of landscape is a direct prolongation of a life in diaspora,” the artist An-My Lê once expressed. In the 1990s, two decades after her family escaped Vietnam, she returned to capture images of locations shadowed by the presence of brutality. Subsequently, she documented American military training sites and Vietnam war reenactors. Lê’s latest project, showcased in dimly lit spaces at Marian Goodman’s spacious new flagship in downtown New York, unveils the celestial night vistas of the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. The visuals are ancient and unsettling, as fire observation posts stand guard, or an atomic-orange dawn scorches the skyline. Serving as a contemplation of what she describes as the “paranoid sublime,” the exhibit creates a captivating contrast to Boris Mikhailov’s Refracted Times, currently presented upstairs at Goodman, which reflects on Ukraine’s “transforming destiny” from the 1960s until today.

An-My Lê: Dark Star/Grey Wolf at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, through February 22, 2025.

Japanese Women Photographers — Netherlands

A necessary counterbalance to the male-centric narrative of Japanese photography, I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, curated by Pauline Vermare, Mariko Takeuchi, and Lesley A. Martin, showcases a diverse array of photographic methods, including installation art, video, and printed materials. Coinciding with a publication from Aperture, I’m So Happy serves as an essential guide to the impact of Japanese women in photography, revealing intimate insights into daily life, critical views on history, and innovative experiments with the art form.

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now at Fotomuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, January 18–May 5, 2025

Tiny Vices — New York

In 2005, photographer Tim Barber established Tiny Vices, a platform showcasing an enticing array of portfolios from a diverse group of global photographers. The site swiftly gained a devoted audience, evolving into a space for exploration and learning—nurturing a sense of community and interaction with visuals that would later be leveraged by social media corporations to amass tremendous wealth. In 2008, Aperture partnered with Barber to produce a series of publications by the featured photographers from the site. Among the artists on Tiny Vices were renowned figures, such as Ryan McGinley, established photographers who had not yet received due recognition, and emerging talents who, two decades later, are now frequently highlighted in galleries, museums, and magazines. “I have always regarded the project as a time capsule from a specific period,” Barber remarks. “The site itself was perpetually evolving and challenging to define. Was it a blog? A collective? A publication? An art gallery? A piece of art? I was never quite certain, but I consistently referred to it as an archive.”

Tiny Vices Archive 20th Anniversary Exhibition at the Hole Contemporary, New York, February 8–23, 2025

Digital Witness — Los Angeles

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the influence of Adobe Photoshop along with various digital-manipulation instruments on visual artistry from the 1970s to the present. Showcasing over eighty creatives, including Cory Arcangel, Petra Cortright, Loretta Lux, Thomas Ruff, and Andy Warhol, the exhibition investigates how image-editing software, by integrating novel techniques of layering, transparency, and scale, has transformed our perception of reality. As curators Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger state, “Software might be regarded as a neutral instrument, or even a creative partner; nevertheless, ethical issues—algorithmic biases, surveillance and data extraction, piracy, absence of regulation, energy consumption—must additionally be addressed.”

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until July 13, 2025