Open call for artwork:
Beyond The Perspective of What You See (exhibition dates, 10/2/26 - 3/28/27)
Submissions due: September 6, 2026
Travel photography has long shaped how we understand people, place, culture, memory, and movement. From postcards and tourism campaigns to personal archives and documentary work, the camera often acts as both witness and translator. Yet every image carries perspective, bias, longing, and power.
This exhibition seeks photographers and lens-based artists whose work challenges traditional ideas of travel photography. Rather than romanticizing escape or reducing places to aesthetic backdrops, this exhibition invites deeper questions:
What does it mean to “capture” a place?
Who gets to travel freely, and who does not?
How do tourism, migration, displacement, colonialism, climate change, labor, and globalization shape movement across the world?
What responsibilities do photographers have to the people and communities they document?
How does travel transform identity, memory, belonging, or alienation?
Can travel photography move beyond spectacle and consumption?
We welcome work that is reflective, experimental, documentary, conceptual, intimate, poetic, or confrontational. Artists may explore personal journeys, inherited histories, diasporic identity, family migration stories, pilgrimage, road culture, borders, tourism economies, environmental change, cultural preservation, or the emotional geography of place.
This exhibition aims to complicate the fantasy of travel and instead examine the layered realities of movement, observation, and encounter.
Curated by Joshua Hollingsworth, Director of Education at The Delaware Contemporary
Eligibility:
You must be 18 years of age or older
Create within the realm of photography and lens-based mediums
You must create an ArtSource account to submit to the call (see below for fee waivers)
To apply to this open call, follow the three-step process.
Fill out this submission form, this is to gather your contact information.
Create an ArtSource account* if you haven't already. Click the “submit” button and sign up/log in. Then upload your artist statement, bio, and portfolio of artwork.
Click on “portfolio” in your dashboard, then click the “Curated Shows” tab to the far right and search for “Our Sun Is Rising — Our Sun Is Setting”. The link to submit your artwork will be on this page.
*ArtSource charges an annual fee of $35 that helps us pay for the web developers who designed and maintain the site. We believe our fees should provide a service that extends beyond the open call that brought you here. You will have a full year of access to ArtSource where curators at TDC and elsewhere seek out talents like you.
If you have questions or issues with any step of this process, please contact Dr. Morgan Hamilton, mhamilton@decontemporary.org
