praxis Competitions / Calls for Entry
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Theme: Animal Life | Curated By: Praxis Directors 2026
• empathy • connection • wonder • coexistence • portrait • presence
From companion animals and farm creatures to insects, birds, sea life, and wildlife in their natural habitats, Animal Life invites photographic work that honors the complexity, beauty, and individuality of animals across species and environments.
Artists are encouraged to approach their subjects with curiosity, empathy, and imagination. Whether through quiet observation, environmental portraiture, documentary approaches, or experimental interpretations, the exhibition welcomes diverse perspectives that explore the many ways humans encounter and represent the living world around us.
Across species and settings, these photographs invite viewers to look more closely and consider the shared environments and relationships that shape life on this planet. All lens-based work is welcome.
Theme: Black & White | Juror: Sandrine Hermand-Grisel
• reduction • contrast • structure • clarity • tone • form
Black & white photography distills the image to its essential elements. Without the presence of color, attention shifts to light, shadow, composition, and the relationships between forms. Tonal range, texture, contrast, and spatial structure become primary tools for visual expression.
Praxis Gallery seeks photographic work that engages the formal and conceptual potential of black & white imagery. From documentary to abstract, from traditional darkroom prints to contemporary digital processes, this exhibition considers how artists use reduction to clarify vision and intensify meaning. All genres and approaches to lens-based work are welcome.
Theme: The Portrait | Juror: Elizabeth Flinsch • 2026
• identity • presence • attention • encounter • representation • self
A portrait begins with attention. It is an act of looking — and of being looked at.
Every portrait holds a tension between appearance and interior life. A face, a posture, a gesture, a setting — each carries information, but also ambiguity. Some portraits are direct and documentary. Others are constructed, performative, or conceptual. Some reveal intimacy; others explore distance, anonymity, or self-invention.
To make a portrait is to engage another presence — or to turn the camera toward oneself — and to consider how identity is shaped, expressed, withheld, or transformed through the photographic frame.
Praxis Gallery seeks photographic portraits that explore the depth and complexity of the human subject. We invite work that reflects lived experience, psychological presence, cultural context, or formal exploration through the lens.
All lens-based photographic and lens-based art practices are welcome.
Theme: Composed: Balance, Repetition, Disruption• Juror: Praxis Director
Composed: Balance, Repetition, Disruption invite photographers to consider how images are shaped through compositional decision-making and visual relationship. These elements operate not as steps, but as interacting conditions. An image may begin in equilibrium or fracture it immediately; repetition may stabilize form or reveal instability; disruption may interrupt order or expose patterns already at work.
Artists may engage these ideas independently or in combination. Some work may emphasize clarity and restraint, others accumulation, variation, or rupture. Subject matter is open; what matters is how form, space, rhythm, and visual weight function within the frame—and how their relationships shape perception.
This exhibition approaches composition as an active, exploratory process rather than a fixed hierarchy, inviting artists to test how images hold together, repeat themselves, or come undone.
Theme: Numbers, Symbols & Letters • Juror Dallas Crow
Theme: Letters, Numbers & Symbols • Juror Dallas Crow
What’s written, scrawled, printed, posted, erased, illegible. Letters, words, glyphs, equations, signatures, graffiti, advertising, envelopes, love letters, cursive, ampersands, abbreviations, charts, graphs, lines in the sand, hieroglyphs, runes, legends, typos, billboards, mistakes, regrets, palimpsests, fragments, fractions, chicken scratch, alphabets, phrases, nouns, verbs, neon, slogans, documents.
Praxis seeks submissions of photographic art that includes letters, numbers, and/or symbols as a fundamental aspect of the composition. All genres, capture types, black & white and color, traditional and non-traditional photographic and digital post-production processes are welcome for submission.