Washington City Paper | The Best in Local Photography Exhibits for 2025
“Clam Digger,” Courtesy of Vincent Ricardel and gallery neptune & brown
City Paper’s longtime photography critic rounds up his seven favorite shows of the year, from Jo Levine’s seamless presentation of overlapping layers to Colin Winterbottom’s mix of old-school black and white, sepia toning, and color UV pigment on aluminum.
Louis Jacobson
December 9th, 2025
In the quarter-century-plus that I’ve been a City Paper photography critic, my year-end list of the best photography exhibits in the D.C. area has usually included a couple of nods to larger museums. Not this year. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but in 2025, each of the seven exhibits on my list were held in spaces where it would be only a modest exaggeration to say you could reach your arms out and touch two opposing walls at once.
Since 2001, I have assembled a list of the top exhibits in the D.C. area on a (mostly) annual basis. This year, I’ve selected—and ranked—seven exhibits that merit a place on the list of best local photography exhibits of 2025. I also offer shout-outs to three visual arts exhibits beyond the bounds of photography.
This year’s list of best D.C.-area photography exhibits is dominated by such cozy confines as gallery neptune & brown, Alexandria’s Multiple Exposures Gallery, Studio Gallery, the Byrne Gallery’s temporary D.C. outpost, Photoworks, Foundry Gallery, and Georgetown University’s Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo Art Gallery.
Here’s the rundown:
1. Vincent Ricardel: Chasing Light at gallery neptune & brown
“Legs with Glove,” courtesy of Vincent Ricardel and gallery neptune & brown
Vincent Ricardel’s 15 images may have been largely observational photographs in urban and natural areas, but stylistically (and geographically) they were all over the map. Alternating between black and white and color, Ricardel channeled Karl Blossfeldt’s botanicals, Harry Callahan’s ultra-high contrast of snow and sand, Eugène Atget’s Parisian streetscapes, Andy Warhol’s matrices of muddily rendered faces, and Henri Cartier–Bresson’s “decisive moment”—in Ricardel’s case, an image featuring a girl, a cat, and more than a dozen pigeons, each in motion. Ricardel even hat-tipped Katsushika Hokusai’s famous wave with a dark moodiness, seemingly threatening a mostly submerged figure nearby. Ricardel’s work often involved partial or bent legs—one foot emerging from a building window, several belonging to ballerinas, one belonging to the girl with the pigeons, one from a cross-legged man partially obscured by a tree, one sticking out of the water in East Hampton, New York, and a pair belonging to schoolgirls on a sidewalk, captured as they’re walking out of the frame. For a photographer with such divergent styles and methods, this habit counted as the one unifying theme of his work.