Open call - Opportunties

Dark Peak Photo Open Call: A Platform for Contemporary Photography

Each year, Dark Peak Photo invites photographers to take part in its annual open call exhibition, a key element of the Dark Peak Photo Festival and an important platform for contemporary photographic practice in the High Peak.

The open call is deliberately inclusive, welcoming submissions from photographers at all stages of their practice and working across all photographic approaches — from documentary and portraiture to experimental and conceptual work. A theme is set annually to provide a shared framework, encouraging artists to respond critically and creatively while retaining their own visual language.

Selected works are professionally printed and exhibited across a network of venues and shop windows in Glossop, transforming the town into a distributed gallery space. This approach situates photography within everyday public life, allowing audiences to encounter a wide range of perspectives outside traditional gallery settings and encouraging engagement between artists, place and community.

Further opportunties

Participation in the open call can also lead to further opportunities with Dark Peak Photo. Photographers selected through previous open calls have gone on to present their own exhibitions, been invited to exhibit elsewhere, and had their work included in published photographic books. In this way, the open call acts not only as an exhibition opportunity, but as a potential starting point for longer-term artistic development and collaboration.

From the last two open calls, Dark Peak Photo has approached selected photographers to create the festival’s hero image. For this year’s festival, we invited Catriona Gray to use her open call submission Two Different Days, One Winter Long Ago. Gray is an experimental photographer and artist based in Camden, and her abstract approach was deliberately chosen to avoid a literal interpretation of the theme. As Identity is often immediately associated with portraiture, the selected image offers a more open and interpretive entry point into the festival.

@Catriona Gray - Two Different days, One Winter Long ago

The exhibition reflects Dark Peak Photo’s wider commitment to accessibility, participation and the role of photography as a cultural and social practice. By combining an open submission process with a carefully curated outcome, the open call supports emerging voices while placing them alongside more established practitioners.

This year’s theme is identity and to enter - the link is on curator space it is free to enter - click here