Organizer Information
The BCN-DH International Photo Festival on Human Rights and Global Justice is organized by the Más Retina photography collective, in collaboration with the Associació Catalana per la Pau (ACP) and International Action Peace, with the additional support of the Barcelona City Council's Global Justice and Cooperation Area and the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Más Retina was founded by cultural managers and professional documentary photographers with backgrounds spanning photojournalism postgraduate study, decades of documentary practice, and prior recognition including the Gabriel Cualladó International Digital Photography Award (IVAM), the Fundación Caixa Galicia–Joan Cancelo photojournalism prize, the Pictet Prize, and UNESCO's Humanity Photo Award. Since 2021, members of Más Retina have co-directed the BCN-DH festival, which has run multiple prior editions presenting large-format street exhibitions across Barcelona's districts around International Human Rights Day.
Title & Description
VI BCN-DH International Photo Festival on Human Rights and Global Justice — Barcelona 2026 Call
Más Retina is opening the call for the 6th edition of the BCN-DH photography competition, part of the Barcelona International Photo Festival on Human Rights and Global Justice. Using photography as a tool for social justice, the festival aims to shed light on global problems and their root causes, and to create spaces for reflection and information that foster a critical citizenry able to engage in today's debates. The ten projects selected by the jury will be exhibited as large-format street displays across Barcelona, one in each city district, from December 1, 2026 to January 10, 2027, and will also be included in the 2026 edition catalogue and festival magazine.
Theme
Human Rights and Global Justice, organized under four thematic categories: Social Justice, Environmental/Climate Justice, Gender Justice, and Economic Justice. Projects are expected to engage with themes connected to the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Agenda 2030), the global development model, interdependence between actors and countries, and the root causes of inequality. Each of the four categories covers an extensive list of possible sub-themes as detailed in the full rules (e.g. migration and displacement, climate crisis and extractivism, gender-based violence and feminist movements, labor exploitation and global economic inequality).
Categories
- Photography
- Culture
- Art Critic (closest fit for socially engaged documentary work — not a precise match)
- Multiple Disciplines
Eligibility
- Open to professional and amateur photographers
- Applicants must be of legal age (18+)
- Open regardless of nationality
- Staff/personnel of Más Retina are not eligible to participate
- Each participant may submit more than one project, provided each is assigned to its own category
- Each project must be assigned to exactly one of the four contest categories (Social Justice, Environmental Justice, Gender Justice, Economic Justice); the organization reserves the right to reassign a project's category if deemed necessary
Program Benefits & Awards
- Grand Prize: €3,000 cash award for the best of the ten selected projects, chosen from among the category winners
- Three category prizes: €400 cash each, for the best project in each of the three remaining categories (i.e. those other than the overall winner's category)
- Inclusion of the ten selected projects in large-format street exhibitions across Barcelona's ten districts
- Inclusion in the 2026 festival catalogue and festival magazine
- Prize payments are subject to applicable taxes according to the winning authors' nationality
Application Fee
€5 per project, charged at the moment the photographs are uploaded to the Picter platform. Since multiple projects may be submitted, this fee applies per project submitted, not as a flat one-time cost.
How to Apply?
Online Application
Key Dates
- Application Deadline: 9 October 2026
- Jury Decision: 30 October 2026
- Festival Presentation: 1 December 2026
- Winner Announcement: 10 December 2026
- Festival / Exhibition Run: December 1, 2026 – January 10, 2027
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Additional Details
- The jury is composed of photography professionals specializing in human rights, along with people connected to the world of cooperation and human rights; its decisions are adopted by simple majority and are final/non-appealable
- Finalist selection method: the two best projects from each of the four categories are automatically selected (8 projects total); the remaining 2 finalist slots go to the two highest-scoring third-place projects across all categories, ensuring every category has at least two representative projects
- The organization reserves the right to exhibit fewer images than originally submitted, due to space constraints at some exhibition locations
- Exhibition production costs are covered by the festival, according to available budget
- Organizers may use winning images for festival promotion (catalogue, traditional channels, social media, newsletters) while always crediting authorship
- Participants retain full copyright/intellectual property ownership of their work; they grant Más Retina a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate, and technically adapt submitted works solely for festival-related promotion, documentation, and archival purposes — not for unrelated commercial or independent use, which would require separate authorization
- Participants must guarantee they hold all rights to their images, including explicit consent from any identifiable individuals depicted (or from a parent/guardian if a minor is depicted), and indemnify Más Retina against related claims
- The organization reserves the right to postpone, shorten, extend, modify, suspend, or cancel the contest if necessary, and to modify the announced calendar if doing so benefits the event
- Submitted material cannot be modified, withdrawn, or renounced once delivered
- Personal data is processed in accordance with Spanish data protection law (LO 3/2018); participants may exercise access, rectification, objection, deletion, and portability rights by writing to masretinaphoto@gmail.com