Der Greif Guest Room Online Exhibition

Guest Room is a monthly online exhibition with open submissions curated in real-time by personalities from the international photography scene. Der Greif is an award-winning organization for contemporary photography. It is print-publication, online-publication, curatorial team and joint project all at once. Der Greif connects the digital and the analogue, exploring and expanding the borders and limits of image-distribution and -reception in the digital era.

Theme for Guest Room

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt, who is a Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, has decided to join forces with photo-based artist Keisha Scarville.

To guide your submissions for this Guest Room, they have developed the following framework: “Poetics of Darkness.”

As both a technological medium and a rich modality of cultural expression, photography is both taught and theorized as a manipulation of light, specifically, how photographers respond and position themselves, their cameras, and subjects in relation to light. It is in this way a practice that implicitly seeks to move away from darkness. What would it mean to embrace a counter-intuitive understanding of photography that inverts this structuring logic? Put differently, rather than focusing on how light interacts with the subject, what would it look like to focus on how photographic subjects interact with and respond to darkness and shadow? What might it look like to engage darkness as itself an active site of illumination? And what would it mean to activate shadow in ways that make darkness resonate?

“We are interested in images that activate shadow and darkness not as a negative void, but as dynamic and expressive space. We encourage the submission of images that explore multiple implications of shadow as a poetics, as action (verb, adverb, agent), as active rather than passive, and as charged rather than inert. We welcome imaginative photographs that bend our vision toward a capacious embrace of darkness rather than light.”

Why submit to Guest Room?

Get the chance to be awarded a 1.000 € Guest Room Scholarship sponsored by MPB
Be discovered by two experts in contemporary art and photography
Get published in an online showcase on Der Greif alongside emerging artists from all over the world
Submit for free or pay a voluntary donation of 8€
Please note: Images which have been selected for a previous Der Greif opportunity are not eligible for re-submission. We want to support the broadest range of photographers possible and therefore encourage you to submit work that has not yet been selected by our past Guest Curators. Any images which do not comply with these terms will be removed from the selection process.