by Olivia Noss // Oct. 10, 2025
In the group show ‘Close Enough,’ C/O Berlin presents a selection of women photographers, members of the international photographic cooperative Magnum, who have created work in response to Magnum founder Robert Capa’s claim: “if your images aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” The assertion, made initially with regard to war reportage, takes on new meanings through the images of these photographers.
Their approaches vary widely in both content and form–some investigate closeness as a form of intimacy and trust, while others play with proximity as a tool for subverting gendered power dynamics. In this collection of works, the lens-based artists explore what it means to wield a camera as a woman in the 21st century, and how their respective identities enrich their work and allow them access to subject matter largely unseen and untold.
The joy of girlhood is a recurring theme among this collection of works. Turkish photographer Sabiha Çimen provides a primary example of this through her series ‘Hafiz: Guardians of the Qur’an,’ which captures the daily lives of young girls at Qur’an schools around Turkey. The resulting images, mounted on panels of a room divider, reveal the daily pleasures of these young women–their expressions of individuality along with their quiet forms of rebellion. Çimen’s series is, in her own words, autobiographical, as its creation involved reliving a coming of age experience that is personal and celebratory.
Meanwhile, Argentinian artist Alessandra Sanguinetti’s series ‘The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams,’ also explores the youth of two young girls in a longstanding portrait collaboration. From 1998, Sanguinetti tracked the lives of two young girls living on a farm in rural Argentina. The tender way in which she documents a friendship unfolding from girlhood into womanhood is one that charms and excites. In this context, Sanguinetti uses photography as a way to form and maintain a friendship with these women, as they enter new stages of their lives.
Other artists in the show consider how to employ a camera to invert power roles, particularly as they relate to gender. Hannah Price’s images are a unique example of this, albeit subtle. Price’s portraits depict men that have cat-called her or shouted after her on the street during her time living in Philadelphia. Rather than shying away from these advances from strangers, Price approached these men and asked them whether she could take their portraits. The resulting images are surprisingly tender portrayals of masculinity that reveal a bid for connection between the photographer and her surrounding community.
Similarly to Price’s work, Mexican photographer Cristina de Middel tests the camera’s potential to engage with men in intimate ways. In 2015, De Middel published an advertisement in a local newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, seeking men to discuss their experience paying for sex work. Over the span of seven years, De Middel created portraits around the world at major cities with sex industries, such as Mexico City, Havana, Bangkok, Lagos, Paris, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Kabul. Middel’s portraits are remarkably soft–they feature men in repose, lit in warm light, splayed on beds, sometimes non-threateningly, while other times seeming to view the encounter as an invitation of some sort. The captions reveal a wide range of reasons for paid sex, some deriving out of curiosity, others out of loneliness. Through the making of this work, the photographer offers insights into the motivations of 99 men and one woman, assuming a risk in doing so.
In a similar way, Carolyn Drake’s series ‘Men Untitled,’ portrays older men in jarring and haunting ways. Drake considered the scrutiny she had placed upon women’s bodies, and realized she hadn’t done so in the same way with those of men. The act of making these portraits, in Drake’s terms, was a way of confronting a subject that was in some ways threatening or taboo. Her images contend with representations of masculinity, as she asks men to remove their clothing, directing and staging scenes, some of which are compromising sexually. One image shows a man crawling on all fours across a log in the middle of the night, illuminated by jarring fluorescent light, like forest prey.
The images in this show are ultimately about power: how we conceive of it, how we leverage it and how we reconcile its impermanence through the instrument of the camera. The element of risk associated with the making of these images reveals a thorough dedication to the medium by these artists. While a camera can be an instrument of agency, these works provide a stark reminder that the tool does not protect one fully, that to move through the world as a woman often remains a vulnerable experience. That said, it is by virtue of the fact that these photographers are women that they are able to access the spaces that they do, to form close bonds with those they represent and to create a sense of intimacy and trust that surfaces in these works. The risks taken for the sake of closeness reflect a willingness by these image-makers to reimagine the photographic landscape of our time.
Exhibition Info
C/O Berlin
Group Show: ‘Close Enough: Perspectives by Women Photographers of Magnum’
Exhibition: Sept. 27, 2025–Jan. 28, 2026
co-berlin.org/…/close-enough
Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin, click here for map
