PhotoPlace Gallery - "The Human Experience" International Photography Open Call

• PhotoPlace Gallery

• Deadline: October 5th, 2026

• Theme: The Human Experience

• Prize: Exhibition in Vermont (USA) + Sales

• Entry Fees: Yes

• REGISTRATION: CLICK HERE

What does it mean to be human? It can be found in a fleeting glance between strangers, a family gathered around a table, a worker finishing a long day, a celebration shared by a community, or the quiet traces someone leaves behind. It can emerge through moments of joy, grief, resilience, uncertainty, connection, change, and discovery. With The Human Experience, PhotoPlace Gallery invites photographers to explore these countless and often contradictory dimensions of human life.

We welcome photographers to submit work for this juried exhibition, which celebrates the richness, complexity, and diversity of the human experience. There are no narrow boundaries around how the theme must be interpreted. We are interested in photographs that reveal something about who we are, how we live, how we relate to one another, and how our identities and experiences are shaped by the families, communities, cultures, histories, and places around us.

Portraits, street photographs, documentary projects, photojournalism, and images addressing current affairs are all welcome. We also invite work exploring family, friendship, labor, culture, identity, community, belonging, displacement, tradition, social change, and everyday life. A photograph might tell the story of one person, document the life of a community, capture a moment in history, or reveal a larger human story through a seemingly ordinary scene.

We encourage photographers to look beyond the obvious. Sometimes the human story is found in a face or gesture; sometimes it is embedded in a place, an object, an empty room, a landscape, or a structure shaped by human hands. Photographs do not need to depict people directly to speak powerfully about humanity. The traces we leave behind—and the environments we create, alter, inhabit, and share—can tell stories just as compellingly as a portrait.

We are drawn to work that embraces the full spectrum of human life: the beautiful and the difficult, the intimate and the public, the joyful and the heartbreaking, the mundane and the extraordinary. Submissions may be quiet and contemplative or bold and dramatic; deeply personal or broadly social; observational or conceptual. Above all, we seek photographs that create a sense of recognition, curiosity, empathy, reflection, or connection.

We are delighted to welcome Meredith Fleischer as the juror for The Human Experience. Fleischer will select up to 35 photographs to be presented in the physical exhibition at PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. In addition, approximately 40 photographs will be selected for inclusion in our Online Gallery, allowing more artists and perspectives to become part of the conversation.

Selection offers photographers an opportunity for lasting exposure through PhotoPlace Gallery. All selected photographs will be reproduced in the exhibition book and will remain permanently on the gallery’s website. Selected artists and their work will also be promoted through PhotoPlace Gallery’s publications and social media channels.

We invite photographers to contribute images that make us pause, look, feel, question, remember, or see the familiar in a new way. The Human Experience is an invitation to consider the stories that connect us—and the remarkable variety of ways those stories can be seen through photography.