2025 Photography Show Unveils the Medium's Stunning Diversity

AIPAD hosted its annual Photography Show this April at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, NY.

Paul Cupido, “Hommage to Shoji 11 & 12,” 2024

If placed on a timeline with other media, photography would appear closer to the end. It’s comparatively nascent, the new kid on the block, and its history only stretches back about 200 years. Even so, the medium’s youth is probably one of its greatest strengths—at least that’s what AIPAD’s 2025 Photography Show seemed to suggest. When walking through the show at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, this much became clear: conventions and expectations are constantly shifting; photographers endlessly experiment with the limits of their craft, and subject matter is as diverse as the techniques used to express them.

Organized by the AIPAD since 1980, the Photography Show serves as the world’s longest-running exhibition dedicated to the photographic medium. This year’s edition offered yet another glimpse into photography’s rich legacy and its ongoing evolution, as led by rising stars and established talents alike. Contemporary icons like Carrie Mae Weems, Marilyn Minter, and Luis González Palma appeared alongside some of the field’s most renowned pioneers, such as Gordon Parks, Ansel Adams, and Henry Fox Talbot, often regarded as one of the founders of modern photography. The show’s scope was further enriched by the sheer number of participating exhibitors, which hailed from across the globe and included Aperture, Galerija Fotografija, 10×10 Photobooks, La Gallerie de l’Instant, Holden Luntz Gallery, and Abakus Projects, among others.

Above all, though, the Photography Show unveiled the incredible diversity of its eponymous medium. Style and composition varied as much as time period and genre, encompassing everything from atmospheric landscape photographs to dramatic portraits of pop culture legends like David Lynch, Anna Wintour, Jimi Hendrix, and Frida Kahlo. No matter the approach, each work showcased the dynamism unique to photography, highlighting not only how far the medium has come but where, exactly, it’s going today.

What was equally fascinating were the countless artists pushing the boundaries of pure photography, resulting in more multidisciplinary practices. Liliana Guzmán, for instance, deftly combined painted and photographic elements in her series Next to Myself. These pieces teemed with color and graphic, illustrative textures, revealing what the artist understands as the “formation of the self as an individual with social and ethnic components.” Sarah Sense, on the other hand, presented woven photographs, inspired by her grandmother’s basket weaving and her Indigenous heritage. Composed of several photographic strands, each meticulously threaded together, Sense’s compositions play with two- and three-dimensionality to such an extent that it’s nearly impossible to look away.

2024 marked the return of the Photography Show to the Park Avenue Armory, where this year’s edition was also staged. Though striking in and of itself, the show did benefit from being held in this particular venue. The Armory’s high ceilings gave each work more room to breathe, while its industrial finishes complemented the mechanical aspects of photography. Taken in its entirety, the 2025 Photography Show celebrated the medium’s singular ability to reveal the stories—whether real or imagined—that we tell ourselves.

Next year’s edition will be held from April 22 to April 26, 2026. To learn more, visit AIPAD’s website.