I know everyone is rushing to put together their “Best Of” lists. We all look back at this point and try to remember the high points of the year.  And so I asked around and these were the photo shows that people loved in 2012 (in no particular order). The great thing about this list is that it goes around the world. So enjoy, and if I’ve missed something, let me know.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum

William Klein / Daido Moriyama at the Tate Modern

Eugene Atget at MOMA

Taryn Simon at the Corcoran

Eileen Neff “Three or Four Clouds” in Philadelphia

Jan Groover at Janet Borden

Gordon Parks at Howard Greenberg

Edward Burtynsky “Dryland Farming” at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Rinko Kawauchi  at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo

Picturing New York at the High Museum in Atlanta

Richard Misrach “Petrochemical America” at Aperture

Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim Museum

Faking it” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Joel Sternfeld retrospective at C/O in Berlin

Daido Moriyama at Aperture

Nicholas Nixon at Eric Dupont in Paris

Vivian Maier at the Howard Greenberg and Steven Kasher

Richard Misrach “Revisiting the South:Cancer Alley” at the High Museum in Atlanta

Mary Ellen Mark “Prom” at the Philadelphia Art Museum

Robert Adams “The Place We Live” at Yale

Iñaki Bonillas “J. R. Plaza Archive” exhibition at La Virreina Image Centre in Barcelona

Joni Sternbach at Rick Wester

Mark Ruwedel at Yossi Milo Gallery

George Bellows at the National Gallery in DC

Abelardo Morrell at Bonni Benrubi

Alvin Baltrop at the CAM Houston

“War/Photography” at MFA Houston

“Shoot! Existential Photography” at The Photographers’ Gallery in London

Pimp the Timp in Cologne, Germany

Barbara Bosworth and also Jerry Uelsmann at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA

Lalla Essaydi “Revisions” at the National Museum of African Art in DC

Chris Killip at Le Bal in Paris

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NY

Isa Leshko “Elderly Animals” Houston Center for Photography

Isa Leshko

And I would add

Occupy Wall Street at the South Street Seaport Museum

“Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life” at ICP

12 Gille de Vlieg, Coffins at the mass funeral held in KwaThema, Gauteng, July 23, 1985. © Gille de Vlieg.

Tim Hetherington at Yossi Milo

Photoville in Brooklyn

Henry Horenstein at ClampArt

Nick Brandt at Hasted Kraeutler

“The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951” at the Jewish Museum

Jerome Liebling Photo League

Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949, gelatin silver print. The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund. © Estate of Jerome Liebling.