Rotlicht Festival For Analog Photography 2024 - Call for Entries

Our main exhibition in 2024 will again take place in the impressive premises of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. On over 1300 m2 we will open the festival with our 20 winners from the Open Call 2024. The theme of this year’s festival is »Outsiders« and your submission should be at least marginally related to this theme. More information about the rules, as well as the Q&A, can be found here!

Rotlicht Festival warmly invites artists and photographers to engage with the topic »Outsiders« as narrowly or as broadly as they wish: »Outsiders« can be a proud selfdescription (think of punk culture understanding itself as a microsociety counter to the established and dominant framework), it can be a derogatory term to relegate unwanted individuals to the margins of society (and simultaneously appropriated by marginalized people to empower themselves), or »outsiders« can convey a sense of ambivalence about belonging to a place, a group of people, a family etc.

Moreover, the job of the photographer regularly flirts with the notion of being an outsider: Through press photography, the person behind the camera documents war but attempts to stay away from it, paparazzi are rarely invited into the lives of celebrities but they still invade it, and being a working photographer today means that one is often a freelancer, at times precariously so, and is in a complicated relationship with the capitalist labor market. At times, certain photographic technologies have historically been underrepresented and underappreciated, such as the cyanotype and many others, and as a result been ignored by scholars which also makes them »outsiders« to photographic technologies.