Close Enough & After Nature Prize 25

Three exhibitions ran at C/O Berlin on a single ticket, five days before the run ended. The frame was the institution's 25th anniversary — founded in 2000 at the Postfuhramt, resident at Amerika Haus since 2014.

Close Enough brings together twelve women photographers from Magnum Photos: Olivia Arthur, Myriam Boulos, Sabiha Çimen, Bieke Depoorter, Carolyn Drake, Nanna Heitmann, Susan Meiselas, Cristina de Middel, Hannah Price, Lúa Ribeira, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Newsha Tavakolian. The exhibition originated with the photographers themselves, was curated by Charlotte Cotton at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2022, and adapted for Berlin by Boaz Levin. It was conceived for Magnum's 75th anniversary; in Berlin it met the institution's own — 25 years after the Magnum exhibition with which C/O Berlin opened in 2000.

The title quotes Robert Capa: if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. The exhibition adopts the line and questions it at the same time. Closeness appears here not as physical distance to an event but as trust, complicity, connection. Curatorially, each body of work keeps its own language; there is no overarching thesis the positions are made to serve.

The range shows it. Alessandra Sanguinetti met Guille and Belinda in 1998, three hours south of Buenos Aires; they were nine at the time. Sabiha Çimen documents a Turkish Qur'an school for girls across thirty photographs. Hannah Price portrays men who had catcalled her on the street and whom she then approached. Cristina de Middel gathers accounts from 99 men and one woman who buy sex, across ten cities. Bieke Depoorter asked people she met by chance in Egypt to write their own view directly onto the images in her book dummy. Nanna Heitmann places two long-term projects on Russia on either side of a leporello. Susan Meiselas traces across decades how the Dani of the Baliem Valley in Papua have been photographically represented — a work not shown in the New York edition.

Alongside, the institution shows the two laureates of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 2025, curated by Katharina Täschner. Awarded jointly with the Crespo Foundation since 2024, it carries 40,000 euros per position and cannot be applied for unprompted: a panel nominates and invites submissions.

In You Only Look Once, Lisa Barnard starts from echolocation and from Thomas Nagel's question of what it is like to be a bat. The spatial anchor is the Salton Sea in Southern California: a military test site in the Second World War, today a subject of lithium recovery and technological promise. The title is the name of a real object-recognition algorithm. Photographs meet an immersive video installation, archival interventions, and AI-assisted image analysis.

In Notes on How to Build a Forest, Isadora Romero examines two Ecuadorian cloud forests across three sections, among them the Chocó Andino de Pichincha biosphere reserve. Documentary photographs sit next to experiments with plants and textiles, images from family archives altered by the humidity of the forest, and infrared and UV photography as an approach to how the forest's fauna perceives. It concerns knowledge passed between generations, including that of the Yumbo and Jama Coaque, and a view of the forest that reduces it neither to deforestation nor to carbon storage nor to the Western idea of untouched nature.