C/O Berlin has a way of catching you off guard. You enter expecting an exhibition, and instead you find yourself confronted with your own softness, your own contradictions, your own ideas of what it means to truly see another human being. Close Enough, the institution’s major anniversary exhibition featuring twelve women photographers from Magnum Photos, is built on this subtle emotional ambush. What begins as a survey of contemporary documentary work becomes, very quickly, a study in proximity, how we approach one another, how we let each other in, and how the presence of a camera complicates everything.

The title, borrowed from Robert Capa’s famous dictum, feels almost ironic in this context. Here, closeness is not measured in centimeters but in trust: in the shared complicity between photographer and subject, in the tension that flickers between gaze and reaction. Each room feels like stepping into someone else’s emotional architecture, whether it is the long-term bond Alessandra Sanguinetti has built with two girls in rural Argentina, or Myriam Boulos’s raw, nocturnal embrace of Beirut’s social and political unrest. The exhibition refuses a single narrative, allowing vulnerability, belonging, estrangement, and power dynamics to collide without resolution.

And then comes Cristina de Middel’s project, the one that moved me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Her portraits and interviews with sex workers’ male clients enter the exhibition like a quiet rebellion. Suddenly, the hierarchy of looking is inverted; the men who ache for this type of intimacy who usually go unseen, are placed under the same scrutiny traditionally reserved for the women whose bodies are so often commodified. I felt something shift in me as I read these men’s responses. It was confusing yet strangely clear, soft and yet forceful. There was a humanity I didn’t anticipate, a shared vulnerability that made me question what I thought I knew about desire, shame, and the transaction of intimacy. It dared to answer questions I never knew I had.

This sense of being unmoored, of being moved and destabilized at once, followed me as I stepped into the other exhibitions. After Nature Prize 25, showcasing works by Lisa Barnard and Isadora Romero, widens the lens from interpersonal intimacy to ecological entanglement. Barnard’s You Only Look Once draws unexpected parallels between bat echolocation, driverless cars, and nuclear test sites, probing how technology perceives humans and how humans perceive the beyond-human. Romero’s Notes on How to Build a Forest uses photography, organic materials, and experimental processes to imagine the cohabitation of people and forests as something tender, shared, and continually evolving.

Together with Close Enough, these exhibitions form a constellation of questions about closeness, between people, between species, between stories and the images that attempt to hold them. I walked out of C/O Berlin feeling both expanded and unsettled, grateful for an exhibition that dared to be so human, so porous, so brave in its contradictions.