PhotoPlace Gallery - "The Human Experience" Call for Entries

• PhotoPlace Gallery

• Deadline: October 5th, 2026

• Theme: The Human Experience

• Prize: Exhibition in Vermont (USA) + Sales

• Entry Fees: Yes

• REGISTRATION: CLICK HERE

PhotoPlace Gallery invites photographers from around the world to submit their work to The Human Experience, a juried exhibition dedicated to exploring the richness, complexity, and extraordinary diversity of human life. This exhibition seeks to bring together photographs that reflect the many ways we experience, understand, and connect with one another, offering a wide-ranging and nuanced portrait of what it means to be human.

We welcome a broad interpretation of the theme. Submissions may include portraits, street photography, documentary and photojournalistic work, current affairs, family and domestic life, labor, culture, identity, community, migration, belonging, relationships, and the environments and places we inhabit. Photographs may examine individual experiences or larger social realities, revealing the personal stories, shared histories, and cultural forces that shape our lives.

We are especially interested in work that engages with both the ordinary and the extraordinary—the fleeting moments and significant events, private experiences and collective realities that make up our human existence. Photographers may explore joy and celebration alongside struggle, loss, uncertainty, resilience, conflict, connection, and change. We encourage work that asks questions, creates emotional resonance, challenges assumptions, or simply invites us to look more closely at the people and worlds around us.

The work submitted need not focus directly on people. Photographs of landscapes, interiors, objects, architecture, streets, events, and other traces of human presence are equally welcome when they communicate something meaningful about human experience. We welcome documentary, conceptual, staged, experimental, and fine-art approaches, as well as photographs that are quiet and contemplative, intimate and personal, energetic and dramatic, or visually unexpected.

We are honored to welcome Meredith Fleischer as juror for The Human Experience. Drawing on her experience and perspective, Fleischer will select up to 35 photographs for exhibition at PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. Approximately 40 additional photographs will be selected for inclusion in our Online Gallery, extending the exhibition to a broader audience beyond the physical gallery.

Every selected photograph will receive continued visibility through PhotoPlace Gallery. All accepted work will be reproduced in the official exhibition book and will remain permanently available on the PhotoPlace Gallery website. Selected photographers and their work will also be featured and promoted through the gallery’s publications and social media channels.

We invite photographers to share work that offers a thoughtful, compelling, and personal perspective on the many dimensions of being human. Whether intimate or expansive, documentary or imaginative, familiar or unexpected, The Human Experience celebrates photography’s unique ability to connect us through the stories we see—and the stories we recognize in ourselves.