Rotlicht Festival For Analog Photography - Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities Open Call

• 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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The term Anthropocene refers to an era in which human activity has become one of the dominant forces shaping the planet’s ecosystems, climates, and geological processes. Yet beyond scientific classification, the concept also raises philosophical and cultural questions about perception, responsibility, and the illusion of control. Narratives of endless progress, technological mastery, and human exceptionalism increasingly collide with experiences of environmental fragility, systemic uncertainty, and social instability.

Analog photography occupies a unique position within this discourse. Unlike fully controllable digital systems, analog processes remain deeply tied to physical reality — to light, chemistry, duration, error, and chance. Material traces, imperfections, unpredictability, and transformation are not limitations of the medium, but essential elements of its language. In this context, photography becomes more than documentation; it becomes a site of negotiation between intention and accident, permanence and disappearance.

With Anthropocene: Hybrid Realities, the festival encourages artists to critically and experimentally examine the blurred boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic, the authentic and the constructed. Humanity continuously consumes resources as though they were infinite, alters landscapes on a planetary scale, replaces ecosystems with technological infrastructures, and increasingly functions as a geological force itself. How can analog photography respond to these transformations? What kinds of hybrid realities emerge from the intersections of ecology, technology, memory, fiction, and material process?

We welcome submissions that expand these conversations through innovative, process-oriented, critical, and experimental approaches to analog photography. Works may explore environmental transformation, artificiality, decay, intervention, vulnerability, or entirely new visual languages emerging from the tensions of the Anthropocene.