FOTODOKS Open Call 2025

• Fotodoks Festival

• Deadline: November 15th, 2024

• Prize: €500 + Exhibition in Munich (Germany)

• Theme: Feedback

• Entry Fees: Free

• REGISTRATION: CLOSED. Click HERE for more Opportunities

In 2025, FOTODOKS will once again take place in Munich (DE), offering a group exhibition alongside a four-day program. This year’s event aims to deepen the dialogue around photography, drawing on the ideas of Tina Campt, a Black feminist theorist focused on visual culture, who emphasizes the emotional, historical, and cultural layers within images. The festival will open for artist submissions starting 15 October 2024.

Centered around the theme "Feedback," FOTODOKS calls on professional photographers and lens-based artists, no matter their location, to submit works that engage with this concept. Initially derived from early communication models, 'feedback' combines notions of feeding information and reflecting it back. Today, it touches on how photography facilitates or complicates communication, shaping the way images influence our understanding.

With the rise of viral social media content and algorithm-driven echo chambers, each image we encounter prompts a reaction, often perpetuating existing biases and norms. The 2025 edition of FOTODOKS will explore the nuanced and complex ways feedback functions in a world where empathy, belonging, and resistance are shaped by visual media, and where political and ecological power struggles loom large. Photography has moved beyond documenting life—it now forms a dynamic web of meaning that arises through interaction.

Amid global conflicts, polarization, and political shifts, the theme Feedback resonates with FOTODOKS' mission to reflect on the growing responsibilities within photography. Through its open call, the festival invites artists to interrogate the processes of image production, circulation, and consumption, bringing together new and existing projects that examine feedback in today’s world—whether in social contexts, reflections on the medium, or explorations of identity.

Beyond the open-call, FOTODOKS will extend invitations to specific artists. The festival is committed to diversity and encourages submissions from people of all ethnicities, genders, abilities, and backgrounds. Applications are accepted in English or German, and individuals or groups may apply.