COMPETITIONS
OPEN FOR ENTRIES

The award is made up of 12 monthly competitions – each judged by an industry leader with a wealth of experience and expertise.

CLOSING SOON

IMOGEN BLOW

COLORS

Judge: Thomas Jackson
Deadline: 31 March 2024

THE BRIEF:

“A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.” – Joel Sternfeld

Life is a stream of color. Red, blue, yellow, and a billion pigments in between! We are looking for color-inspired photographs…literally and figuratively. A scene, a detail, a narrative or mood. A single tone or a technicolor daydream.

Urban street scenes, portraits, travel adventures, landscapes, editorial, conceptual, still life… Color our lives.

LEARN MORE, GET INSPIRED

COLORS INSPIRATIONAL GALLERY

IMAGES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) © MAX STURGEON, ASH DANIELSEN, ELLEN JANTZEN, FINN EVANS, KILLA SCHUETZE, GILI BENITA, ARIE BOTBOL, VIKRAM KUSHWAH.

IMAGES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) © MAX STURGEON, ASH DANIELSEN, ARIE BOTBOL, GILI BENITA, ELLEN JANTZEN, FINN EVANS, KILLA SCHUETZE, VIKRAM KUSHWAH.

COMPETITION JUDGED BY THOMAS JACKSON

Thomas Jackson is an American installation photographer who creates kinetic and awe-inspiring imagery through a singular experimental process. He is best known for ambitious, meticulously staged scenes in which bright sculptures interact with natural landscapes. Working with unexpected everyday materials – fabric, straws, post-it notes, ring binders – he arranges them based on the principles of self-organizing ‘emergent’ systems in nature such as termite mounds, locust swarms and bird murmurations. The resulting long-exposure images are both visually dazzling and a dichotomy of ideas: the natural and the manufactured, the simple and the complex, the real and the imagined.

Jackson has worked with organization such as Polaroid and Adobe, been featured in publications such as Harper’s, The New Yorker and Wired, and has been the recipient of awards from PDN, Critical Mass and Center. His first indoor, kinetic installation, entitled “Chaotic Equilibrium,” is currently on view at the Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

IMAGES © THOMAS JACKSON

ARGUS PAUL ESTABROOK

BLACK & WHITE

Judge: Marta Weiss (V&A)
Deadline: 30 April 2024

THE BRIEF:

Color photography may dominate in today’s world, but there remains a special place for black and white. Purity, simplicity, profundity… It is said that constraints fuel creativity, and stripping away color can bring focus to contrast, texture, shape and form. The best black and white photography allows us to see more sharply and feel more deeply.

From the great masters to you – the history of black and white photography is long, but it continues to be written. New or from your archives, of any style and genre, and taken with any camera. This month we want to see images where black and white makes them magical.

LEARN MORE, GET INSPIRED

BLACK & WHITE INSPIRATIONAL GALLERY

OPEN CALL INSPIRATIONAL IMAGES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) © MARKETA ZVELEBIL, JAMES MUNK, PETER FRANCK, BROOKE BOUSQUET, ARGUS PAUL ESTABROOK, BONGANI TSHABALALA, MAISHA QURAISHI, TANJA WILLEKENS.

OPEN CALL INSPIRATIONAL IMAGES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) © MARKETA ZVELEBIL, JAMES MUNK, MAISHA QURAISHI, BROOKE BOUSQUET, ARGUS PAUL ESTABROOK, BONGANI TSHABALALA, PETER FRANCK, TANJA WILLEKENS.

COMPETITION JUDGED BY MARTA WEISS

Marta Weiss is Curator of Photography at the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London, which she joined in 2007 after two years in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She holds a BA in the history of art from Harvard and an MA and PhD from Princeton in the same field, with a focus on the history of photography.

Developing and caring for a world-leading archive of over 800,000 photographic works, she has curated a range of exhibitions on topics such as contemporary Middle Eastern photography and the works of Julia Margaret Cameron, managed the opening of the final phase of the V&A’s Photography Centre, and published books under the V&A’s publishing imprint – Autofocus: The Car in Photography, and Making it Up: Photographic Fictions.

IMAGES © MARTA WEISS / V&A

ERIC THOMPSON

YOUTH

Judge: Karolin Klüppel
Deadline: 31 May 2024

THE BRIEF:

“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

We don’t arrive fully formed. From birth to toddler to child, teen and pre-adult – life is an exploration and we’re moulded in our youth. Dreams, fears, freedom, experimentation, play… The theme is as broad as you want it to be. The only limitation is to capture a scene or a detail that shows habits, experiences or behavior of the young.

Portraiture, studio, candid, conceptual, documentary, street. All genres welcome. Show us youthhood, from any perspective!

LEARN MORE, GET INSPIRED

YOUTH INSPIRATIONAL GALLERY

IMAGES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) © GIEDO VAN DER ZWAN, LARS JUST, JUSTIN KEENE, VIKRAM KUSHWAH, MITCH CULLIN, STEFFEN JUNGHANβ, KRISTIAN LEVEN, PIOTR CHROBOT.

IMAGES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) © GIEDO VAN DER ZWAN, LARS JUST, KRISTIAN LEVEN, VIKRAM KUSHWAH, MITCH CULLIN, STEFFEN JUNGHANβ, JUSTIN KEENE, PIOTR CHROBOT.

COMPETITION JUDGED BY KAROLIN KLÜPPEL

Karolin Klüppel is an in-demand photographer and Women Photograph member whose sensitive and striking work regularly returns to themes of gender, family and motherhood.

She first rose to prominence in 2015 with the series and subsequent monograph Kingdom of Girls – a project that blended documentation and composition to explore the indigenous people of Meghalaya in India who live in a unique matriarchal structure. Since then she has turned her lens onto herself and fellow mothers, exploring the profound experience of motherhood in her series No Room of One’s Own.

She has held solo exhibitions in the US, Switzerland, France, Colombia and her home country of Germany, and has produced editorial works for esteemed publications such as National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Spiegel.

IMAGES © LENA GIOVANAZZI / KAROLIN KLÜPPEL

PRIZES &
BENEFITS

Win cash prizes, global exposure and professional feedback

 

Monthly
1st Prize

Monthly
2nd Prize

Other
Monthly
Winners (18)

All
Entrants

$2,000 monthly cash prize
     
Your image exhibited in three global exhibitions
   
Your image in the Life Framer Photobook
   
Online exposure
 
Personal feedback
Submission to The Collection
Submission to #lifeframerstories 

Life Framer Profiles

– Share your favourite body of work far and wide
– Add a link to your website and social accounts
– Feature your profile in The Collection

Feedback

Over the past few years we’ve helped hundreds of photographers to improve their technique and find their style. Discover some of their happy testimonials here.

UPCOMING COMPETITIONS

COLORS – March 2024

BLACK & WHTE – April 2024

YOUTH – May 2024

THE HUMAN BODY – June 2024

PLANET EARTH – July 2024

PORTRAITS – August 2024

COLORS II – September 2024

HUMANS OF THE WORLD – October 2024

BLACK AND WHITE II – November 2024

URBAN LIFE – December 2024

EXHIBITIONS

TBA – January 2025

TBA – February 2025

A prestigious jury, 4 international exhibitions and $24000 in cash prizes

Title

By continuing to use this website, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. OK