The December 2025 edition of FRAMES Digital brings together photography and writing shaped by attention, care, and lived experience. This is an issue that moves slowly and deliberately, inviting reflection rather than spectacle.

It opens with Dean Golja’s Light Within Walls, an immersive journey inside the Pingyao International Photography Festival. Set within China’s ancient walled city, the essay reveals the festival as a living ecosystem — built on dialogue, education, and human exchange — and offers a rare, thoughtful look at photography as a shared cultural practice.

History and rediscovery follow in Gina Williams’ moving essay on Mattie Gunterman, a pioneering frontier photographer whose work quietly expands our understanding of early photography and whose voice feels strikingly contemporary today.

Landscape becomes both subject and metaphor in Raju Peddada’s Gaia’s Magnificent Gallery, a poetic meditation on perception, motion, and the relationship between inner and outer worlds. In conversation, Alasdair Foster explores Colin Gray’s deeply human, decades-long collaboration with his parents — a body of work that evolves from playful staging into an honest reflection on aging, care, and family.

The issue also offers clarity and challenge. Daniel Bunting rethinks compositional habits in telephoto photography, while Stephen Smith reflects on truth, manipulation, and photographic integrity in the age of AI.

At its emotional core is HER2, a powerful visual dialogue by Anna and Jordan Rathkopf, exploring illness, intimacy, and family life as an ongoing process rather than a closed narrative. The edition closes with W. Scott Olsen’s Reading Frames, a quiet, attentive reading of a single photograph — a reminder of the value of slowing down.

FRAMES members: You can download the new edition right now.

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Each year, we publish twelve issues of FRAMES Digital – PDF publications complementing the main printed editions of the FRAMES Magazine. They feature additional imagery and written content in a high-resolution digital publication delivered directly through the FRAMES Subscriber Area.