Rotlicht Festival For Analog Photography - Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities Call for Entries

• Rotlicht Festival For Analog Photography

• Deadline: June 30th, 2026

• Theme: Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities

• Prize: €250 + Exhibition in Wien + Publication

• Entry Fees: Yes

• REGISTRATION: CLICK HERE

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In 2026, the festival returns once more to the extraordinary halls of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, transforming over 1300 square meters into a space for encounter, experimentation, and dialogue through analog photography. The exhibition will open with works by the 20 selected winners of the Open Call 2026, bringing together artistic perspectives that reflect the urgency, contradictions, and imagination of our time.

This year’s theme, Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities, serves as both a conceptual framework and an open question. We invite submissions that relate to the theme in direct, indirect, critical, emotional, or experimental ways. The Open Call is open from 01.05.2026 until 30.06.2026. Additional details regarding participation, regulations, and frequently asked questions are available online.

Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities

We live in a time shaped by human intervention. Forests disappear, climates shift, oceans rise, infrastructures expand, and landscapes become increasingly synthetic. The Anthropocene names this condition: an age in which humanity has altered the planet so profoundly that it leaves geological traces behind. Yet alongside narratives of technological advancement and control grows a deep awareness of instability, uncertainty, and ecological vulnerability.

Analog photography responds to this tension in a unique way. It is a medium built on physical presence — on light touching surfaces, on chemistry reacting to time, on processes that cannot be entirely predicted or controlled. Dust, grain, exposure, fading, distortion, and accident become part of the image itself. In a world obsessed with precision and optimization, analog photography preserves fragility, imperfection, and material truth.

With Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities, the festival invites artists to investigate the spaces where opposites begin to merge: nature and technology, organic matter and artificial structures, documentation and fiction, reality and simulation. What kinds of images emerge from a world increasingly shaped by extraction, intervention, and reconstruction? How can photography reflect the tension between destruction and beauty, permanence and collapse, intimacy and planetary scale?

We welcome submissions that approach these questions through experimental, critical, poetic, and process-based practices in analog photography. The festival seeks works that challenge fixed perspectives, embrace ambiguity, and expand the conversation around image-making in the age of the Anthropocene.