Brave New Visions: Creativity as Rebellion

This year’s PhotoVogue Global Open Call embraces creativity as rebellion, inviting photographers and video makers to use image-making to challenge indifference, disrupt conventions, and expand visual storytelling.

**What**
We welcome photography, video, and multimedia projects across all genres, including fashion, documentary, portraiture, fine art, and experimental practices.

We are looking for work that expresses a clear point of view, whether through the ideas it explores, the emotions it evokes, or the strength of its visual language. This can take many forms, from powerful storytelling to images that stand out for their aesthetic impact.

**Why**
At a time when images are constantly produced and quickly forgotten, this open call invites artists to create work that resists repetition, holds attention, and makes something felt.

**Grants & Opportunities**

$12,000 in total grants awarded to three artists
Presentation at the next PhotoVogue Festival
Potential publication across Vogue’s global editions
Participation in PhotoVogue Virtual Portfolio Reviews

We are living through a time marked by violence, injustice, and acceleration. Wars continue. Atrocities unfold. Divisions deepen. Uncertainty grows.

And yet, even as the world becomes harder to bear, images move faster than ever. They accumulate, repeat, and dissolve. The more we see, the less we feel. A sense of déjà vu takes hold. A growing numbness. A quiet apathy.

One crisis follows another, and what should shake us risks being absorbed into the endless flow. What is urgent becomes familiar. What is unbearable risks becoming background.

In this landscape, it becomes increasingly difficult to create work that holds attention, that remains, and that leaves a trace. This is true across visual culture, from documentary to fashion, from magazines to art practices. This is not only because of the speed at which images are consumed, but also because these visual forms carry long histories. They are bound by old rules and expectations that make surprise difficult to sustain.

At the same time, creative work unfolds within systems that often reward caution. Across culture, from publishing to cinema to fashion, what is unfamiliar is softened, delayed, or excluded. Too often, the pressure is not to go further, but to remain legible, acceptable, and marketable.

And yet, this is precisely when new ways of seeing become necessary.
The question is no longer simply how to produce images, but how to create images that matter. And perhaps more urgently: how to respond.

As artists and image-makers, how do we react to this condition? What do we choose to put into the world? What kind of images can still interrupt the noise and resist indifference?

The answer is not what is expected. It is not what feels safe. It is what one has the courage to make visible now, in relation to the world we are living in.

Throughout history, moments of rupture have generated new artistic languages. These have never been simply styles, but responses to conditions that demanded other forms, other gestures, other ways of seeing and saying. Today, the conditions are different, shaped by a globalized and hyper-connected image economy where everything circulates at once and at speed. What emerges may not be a unified movement, but a dispersed and urgent search across practices.

**The Invitation**

This open call does not ask for a theme to illustrate. It asks for a position in relation to the world as it is, in relation to what one refuses, what one longs for, questions, resists, imagines, or defends.

There is no single answer. It may take the form of intimacy, care, or attention. It may take the form of confrontation, rupture, or refusal. It may involve invention, disobedience, new visual languages, new aesthetics, and the imagining of new worlds.

What matters is not whether the work belongs to fashion, art, documentary, photography, or video. What matters is the force, the urgency, and the necessity behind it.

To create in this context also means allowing oneself a deeper freedom. A freedom from repetition. A freedom from expectation. A freedom from approval. It means creating without the need to please.

At a time when so much is made to disappear into the stream, this open call is an invitation to resist that disappearance. Create from urgency, not habit. Create from conviction, not compliance.

Do not illustrate the world as it is. Answer it.

Do not do so because images alone can repair what is broken, or because they must shock in order to matter. Do so because they can still make visible, still make felt, and still make present.

We seek forms that unsettle or console, disturb or illuminate, confront or accompany. We seek images that carry the force of a real encounter. Images that do not soften themselves in order to be received. Images that insist, against indifference, that something remains at stake.

Because to see, and to make others see, is still a profound form of responsibility. And, perhaps now more than ever, an act of courage.

**Who we are looking for**

We invite photographers and video makers from around the world whose work engages with the present through a distinct and compelling visual language. Across all genres—from fashion to documentary, portraiture, fine art, and beyond—we are looking for practices that carry a strong point of view and a sense of necessity.

Image: Delali Ayivi