Curators from various cultural institutions in the Rhine-Main region come together every three years to jointly develop a contemporary guiding theme for the RAY Triennial of Photography.

This form of collaboration brings together different perspectives and areas of expertise in a productive exchange, allowing them to be presented collectively. This is one of RAY’s particular strengths.

The inaugural RAY 2012, titled Making History, focused on the reflection of public images and presented works that addressed the staging of reality through media representations. The second edition, RAY 2015, under the theme Imagine Reality, explored how photography not only depicts our reality but also creates new realities. In the exhibitions on the theme Extreme, RAY 2018 presented artists who reflected on global socio-economic changes as well as the role and function of photography, focusing on the exceptional rather than the norm.

With RAY Ideologies, the fourth triennial in 2021 thematically struck at the heart of a changing global society, which faced extreme challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which democratic structures were being questioned and models of autocratic governance were gaining increasing support in both East and West. The fifth edition, RAY 2024 Echoes, explored how images contribute to our understanding of identity, memory, and emotions, as well as our capacity to grasp and process current social and political challenges.