Things are changing fast these days. As the old year turns into the new, many of the season’s photo exhibits are contemplating transformation. Winter 2024 photo exhibits meditate on all kinds of change—fast and slow, societal and personal, and the ever-intriguing transformations photographic artists make with light. 

An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers / Giữa hai giòng sông / Entre deux rivières 

An-My Lê takes an uncommon approach to exploring conflict with a lens, capturing physical landscapes transformed by militarism and strife, and gesturing at a metaphorical terrain of history and war. This exhibit presents images from 30 years of her photographic work, along with film, textiles, and sculpture. It runs through March 16 at MoMA in New York. 

Frank Ockenfels 3: Introspection 

What began as lighting diagrams for his shoots became a long-running journal detailing Ockenfels’s projects, ideas, and conversations. This exhibit organizes work from various periods of his career around those journal entries, creating a throughline for the collection of oneiric portraits and multimedia pieces. The exhibit runs through March at Fotografiska in New York. 

Trust Me 

Works from 11 artists explore all manner of shared emotional experiences in this show, from family ties and friendship to romance and influence. Some take the theme on directly through portraiture, while others opt for a more oblique approach with images that don’t include people at all. The subtext of this exhibit isn’t just about how relationships change people and places, but how images of them change you, the viewer. You can find out for yourself at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The show is up through February. 

Wonders and Witness: Contemporary Photography from Korea 

Presenting over 80 images by 12 photographers, this exhibit organized with Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art illuminates the crucible of tradition, modernization, Western influence, and urbanization that has forged contemporary life in South Korea. The show runs through January 27 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. 

Sea Change 

SFMOMA delved into its permanent collection for this expansive show, assembling images from more than 50 photographers to explore how the medium represents change. They’re arranged into eight galleries that focus on different sorts of transformation, from the historical and cultural to—as you’ve already guessed from the title’s double entendre—the natural. The exhibit runs through March 17 in San Francisco. 

Ellen Carey: Struck by Light 

What are all the ways you can transform light into color, form, and emotion? Ellen Carey seems determined to find out. This retrospective presents the fruits of her long exploration of the artistic possibilities of exposing photosensitive media to light, including large-scale photograms and abstract Polaroid art. The show runs through January 28 at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, and through March at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, England. 

Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist 

How have society and photography changed over the past century? Willie Anne Wright could tell you, since she’s turning 100 in 2024. This exhibit presents 63 inventive photographs in a range of media from her 60-year career, along with nine of her paintings. The exhibit runs through April 28 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. If you make it by February 25, check out Dawoud Bey: Elegy, too. That exhibit explores the transitional history of Africans arriving in the U.S. in bondage, enduring enslavement, and emerging into self-emancipation. 

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective 

Another photographer with a 60-year career to draw on, Daido Moriyama captured the transformations of a country rebuilding itself in post-WWII Japan, and in turn transformed the era’s photographic aesthetic with his gritty avant-garde style. This exhibit includes over 200 images and large-scale installations, along with photo books and magazines. It runs through February 11 at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. 

Viviane Sassen—PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion 1990–2023 

This retrospective of Viviane Sassen’s work presents over 200 works, including photographs, collages, paintings, and videos. Her bold use of color and form has earned her a place in the world of fashion photography, but her work transcends the genre, blurring the lines between realism and abstraction. The exhibit runs through February 11 at MEP in Paris. 

Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything 

Caffery’s distinctive aesthetic infuses her black-and-white images with a depth of feeling that ranges from the ominous to the contemplative. This retrospective presents almost 100 of her photographs from 60 years of contemplating the American South, Mexico, and France, as well as some extremely distinguished birds. The exhibit runs through March 3 at the New Orleans Museum of Art. 

Murray Fredericks: The Salt Lake 

Twenty years ago, Fredericks photographed one of the world’s largest salt lakes in the deserts of central Australia. Since then, he has returned to Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre 31 times to capture it again, building a poetic body of work that traces the ways this landscape changes with the weather and light—and how its vast expanse remains the same over time. You can see it at the Museum of Australian Photography in Wheelers Hill, Victoria, until February 18 if you’re enjoying the Australian summer this season. 

Carlijn Jacobs Sleeping Beauty 

Artificial intelligence will transform image making—along with everything else. You can get a look at this fast-arriving future in Carlijn Jacobs’s inventive show. Already known for blending the fashionable with the conceptual, Jacobs used AI to create some of the images on display, and worked with artist Sabine Marcelis to design the immersively surreal exhibit. The show will be up through January 21 at FOAM in Amsterdam. Check the museum’s schedule to visit when there’s a walk-in workshop scheduled and try your hand at AI image creation with DALL-E. 

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows 

Arthur Tress started out as a documentary street photographer in the mid-20th century, capturing the reality of New York City life. But over the years, figures from his interior life began to creep into his images, and his realistic style grew into the magical realism that he’s known for today. You can explore the urban dreamscapes he created at the Getty in Los Angeles through February 18. While you’re there, check out Sheila Metzner’s elegant 20th century Pictorialist take on image making. 

Berenice Abbott: Changing New York 

The title says it all. Abbott captured a pivotal moment of change during 1930s New York, as the city was transformed by groundbreaking builders and business magnates with grand plans. This exhibit presents a selection of images from her Changing New York series, which broke new ground in its own right. It runs through June 16 at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park. 

Painterly Portraits

The Power of Color to Transform Your Images

The Successful Small Photography Studio

The Imagination Series

Creative Portrait Series