Open Calls

Guest Room is Der Greif's online exhibition format featuring open submissions curated by leading figures in contemporary photography. It is a format designed to foster collaboration, spark creative exchange, and amplify new voices in visual culture under a given theme. For this edition, Associate Director of Light Work Whitney Hubbs and lens-based artist and lecturer Jermaine Francis propose the theme "Photography Unbound”.

What happens when we stop viewing photography as a static capture of reality and instead embrace it as an unstable, fluid "relational object"? For this Guest Room, we embrace the unpredictable openness, worldly complexity, and the messy collisions of our contemporary reality. We chose this theme to shift our gaze away from the purely descriptive qualities of the medium, choosing instead to dive deep into its physical textures, vulnerability, and capacity for decay. By treating the image as an active site of friction, we want to explore how the materiality of photography can be used to unlock powerful forms of resistance, subversion, and transformation.

Deadline: August 17, 2026 at 11:59 PM CET

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We invite lens-based artists to explore how nighttime changes how we see the world and how we feel. When the day ends and the streets go quiet, our emotions, memories, and reflections often become much louder. In honor of National Grief Awareness Day on August 30, this open call explores the unique relationship between nighttime and the processing of loss. Deadline: August 8, 2026 at 11:59 PM CET Submit

Photo by Zillah Bowes, "Elinor ‘Rhiwnant’ and Alice (portrait in moonlight)" from the series "Green Dark"

Fondament and Der Greif invite you to peer behind the curtain of the everyday. "Ich seh' etwas, was du nicht siehst" explores the multifaceted layers of social life in Germany, taking its title from the German version of the game "I spy with my little eye."

We are looking for photographs and photographic works that tell more than one story and leave room for different readings. Images that don't just offer a single, clear-cut explanation, but allow for multiple perspectives. We are seeking submissions that make this tension visible: between one's own gaze and a possible counter-gaze, between perception and interpretation. That's why we deliberately ask you: What do you see that others don't?

Fondament is a non-profit organisation dedicated to making poverty and social inequality visible and to strengthening photography and art as tools for reflection and change. Working with networks across art, culture, and the social sector, Fondament creates spaces for dialogue and initiates creative projects.

For additional background information in German on "Ich seh' etwas, was du nicht siehst," please visit Fondament.

Deadline: September 1, 2026 at 11:59 PM CET Submit

This open call for photobooks creates space for critical and poetic approaches to artist books and other kind of publications as a form of shared authorship, collaboration, and storytelling. We welcome publications that engage thoughtfully with contemporary life, visual culture, and the material and narrative possibilities of the book. Selected projects will be featured in Der Greif’s editorial "In Focus" column, offering international visibility and long-term archival presence.

Deadline: November 30, 2026 at 11:59 PM CET

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Photo: Amelie Sachs.