Current Calls for Entries​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Personality: The Face and Its Absence

A curated international photography exhibition

August 22 – September 15, 2026 @ PH21 Gallery Barcelona 

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Portraiture emerged as one of the most prominent genres of depictive media early in the history of the visual arts, and tacit or explicit rules, conventions, and cultural expectations have always influenced the ways in which artists approached the genre. Photography is no exception; numerous different and characteristic styles of portraiture have emerged throughout the history of the medium.

Today, we live in an exciting new era for portraiture. There has never been a time in human history when so many portraits and self-portraits were produced day after day as in the era of digital technologies. Photographers have responded to these cultural, social, and technological changes by reinterpreting the age-old genre of portraiture in countless creative ways.

We usually assume that faces are necessary components of portraiture. However, we may learn just as much about the character, personality, identity, or presence of a person by looking at images that depict other parts of their bodies, gestures, clothing, objects, surroundings, or places associated with them. Not focusing on the face may open up new dimensions of interpretation, while traditional portraits may continue to reveal the complexity of personality through expression, pose, light, setting, and photographic style.

 

PH21 Gallery invites photographers to submit their work for a group exhibition themed Personality: The Face and Its Absence. We welcome submissions from all photographers interested in this genre, providing them with an opportunity to share their work with a broader international audience through the exposure offered by PH21 Gallery. The theme is broadly construed: from traditional fine art portraits to selfies, from facial portraits to images that portray personality through the body, objects, spaces, traces, absence, or symbolic associations. Indeed, we are interested in all possible creative photographic interpretations of the theme. We welcome all types of photo-based images, including multiple exposures, photomontages, photograms, moving-image works, and AI-generated photo-based images.

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This exhibition will be showcased in PH21 Gallery’s beautiful new venue, situated in the heart of Barcelona’s historic Gothic Quarter.

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Submission deadline

• Final deadline: June 30, 2026

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Read more and submit your work here.

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Vision & Expression: The Art of Photography

A curated international photography exhibition

September 19 – October 13, 2026 @ PH21 Gallery Barcelona 

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Although photography initially emerged as a technological invention, it quickly evolved into an expressive artistic practice. Pictorialist photographs from the nineteenth century were crafted to resemble paintings, while proponents of straight photography in the early twentieth century aimed for a purely photographic approach to conveying meaning. Street photographers dedicated the medium to capturing fleeting moments, and in the latter part of the twentieth century, many photographers embraced staging and directing to employ photography as a means of artistic visual communication. Straight photography derives expressive meaning from the observed scene, while directorial, or staged photography involves creating a scene based on a preconceived notion. Art photography today encompasses various genres and creative practices, ranging from portraiture, landscape, and still life to staged, abstract, and conceptual photography. More recently, AI-generated photo-based images have also asserted their presence in the art photography scene.  In this call, we invite contemporary photographers to demonstrate their understanding of photography as an expressive fine art practice in the twenty-first century.

 

PH21 Gallery invites photographers to submit their work for a group exhibition themed Vision & Expression: The Art of Photography. We welcome submissions from photographers interested in photography as an art form and looking for a venue to showcase their work to a broader international audience through the exposure provided by PH21 Gallery. The theme is broadly construed, and we encourage submissions from all artistic photographic genres and styles, including abstract compositions and AI-generated photo-based images (explicitly labelled as such). We are interested in exploring diverse and creative photographic interpretations of what photography as an art form might entail.

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This exhibition will be showcased in PH21 Gallery’s beautiful new venue, situated in the heart of Barcelona’s historic Gothic Quarter.

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Submission deadlines

• Early bird deadline: July 13, 2026

• Final deadline: July 20, 2026

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Read more and submit your work here.

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