CONTEXT 2025

Filter Photo is pleased to present Context 2025, our eleventh annual survey exhibition of contemporary photography. This year's exhibition was juried by Shana Lopes, PhD, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA, and features the work of 27 artists.

"We make sense of the world through images. At its very best, a photograph doesn’t just show us what’s there—it reveals what we’ve overlooked. It reframes the familiar and gives the ordinary a touch of the uncanny. The photographs in Context 2025 do precisely that. They aren’t grand pronouncements or spectacles. They do not demand attention with force. Instead, they operate at a lower frequency, inviting us in with a quieter kind of resonance—the kind that lingers, reshaping how we experience the everyday.

The artists in this exhibition train their lenses on living rooms, cars, kitchens, and porches—those in-between spaces where life accumulates in strange ways. Through their eyes, the absurd and the poetic intermingle, and the most unassuming moments become laced with pathos. Because if we are what we celebrate, we are also what we discard, what we pass by, and what we fail to notice.

In a time oversaturated with images, these photographs remind us why we still need to look at the world around us. They reveal that meaning isn’t just found in the monumental but in the way light falls on a hand at the kitchen table, in the jagged, surreal silhouette of a tree trunk, and in the humor of a lone gate leading to nowhere. These photographs on view show us who we are, one quiet, absurd, beautiful frame at a time."

—Shana Lopes

About the Juror

Shana Lopes, PhD, is an Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA. Born and raised in San Francisco, she has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award. Over the past sixteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Featured Artists 

Mark Almanza, Michelle Arcila, Filippo Barbero, Tracy Chandler**, Eli Craven, Anastasia Davis, Nykelle DeVivo*, Callum Diffey, Claudio Eshun, Jamil Fatti, Jane Flynn, Robin Glass, Luna Hao, Sharon Hart & Izel Vargas, Gabriela Hasbun, Alexander Iglesias, Zachary Kolden, Auston Marek, Andrew McClees, Mariana Mendoza, Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein, Jacob Wachal, Ian White, Rana Young, and Tako Young. 

*Juror's Choice, ** Honorable Mention

Image Credit: Luna Hao