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
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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
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$2,000 monthly cash prize | ||||
Your image exhibited in three global exhibitions | ||||
Your image in the Life Framer Photobook | ||||
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Personal feedback | ||||
Submission to The Collection | ||||
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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