The best photography of 2011: Sean O'Hagan's choice

The Whitechapel Gallery hosted the two "must-see" shows of 2011 with its retrospectives of Paul Graham and Thomas Struth . For me, Graham's show was the photography exhibition of the year, a chance to see his 30-year journey from reportage to a kind of heightened observation that is all his own. The biggest historical show was the V&A's Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, which placed the work of Brassaï, Capa, Kertész and Munkácsi in a national context. In 2011 the photography festival came into its own in Britain. The Format festival brought Joel Meyerowitz and Bruce Gilden to Derby, while the first London street photography festival exhibited work from around the globe, and the inaugural Belfast photo festival presented work from Ireland and abroad. Photography is currently awash with prizes. The Sony World Photography awards was a glitzy affair at the Odeon in Leicester Square. The great Bruce Davidson was deservedly honoured with the outstanding contribution award, and Argentinian Alejandro Chaskielberg took the L'Iris D'or for his luminous series on the islanders of the Paraná river delta. The more contemporary Deutsche Börse prize, hosted by the Photographers' Gallery, went – to a collective sigh of relief – to Jim Goldberg for Open See, an ongoing project where Polaroids, text and film combine to tell the stories of Europe's migrant dispossessed: an epic and groundbreaking body of work. Britain's Vanessa Winship deservedly took the Cartier-Bresson prize for humanist photography for her quietly powerful Black Sea series, which merges formal portraits and mysterious landscapes. In London the temporary closure of the Photographers' Gallery for refurbishment left a hole in the contemporary cultural landscape. In Liverpool the Open Eye Gallery reopened on a new site with a show of Mitch Epstein's huge prints from his lauded American Power series. The big print was the key signature of the year on the international art photography circuit. Last month Andreas Gursky's Rhein II , a big chromogenic print of a rather dull, flat landscape, became the most expensive photograph ever , selling for £2.7m. It is a defiantly postmodern artefact, its unreal sheen and the absence of buildings both reputedly the result of digital post-production. For the more traditional-minded, the V&A opened its new Photographs Gallery with prints from the 1830s to the 1960s. TOP 10 Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006 Whitechapel Gallery, London Diane Arbus Jeu de Paume, Paris Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010 Whitechapel Gallery, London Simon Roberts: We English Flowers East, London Lee Friedlander: America by Car & The New Cars 1964 Timothy Taylor, London Mitch Epstein: American Power Open Eye, Liverpool Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century Royal Academy, London Sohei Nishino: Unreal Cities Michael Hoppen, London Shadow Catchers; Camera-less Photography V&A, London Vivian Maier: A Life Uncovered German Gymnasium, London TURKEY Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography V&A, London