Open Doors Gallery

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Open Doors Gallery

Championing emerging photographic artists Founded in 2017, OPEN DOORS GALLERY is a global platform for contemporary photographic artists.

The gallery aims to give the world’s best emerging talent an opportunity to reach new audiences, and works with a very broad range of artists. From unique collage and sculptural artworks to dark room creations, landscapes, portrait and street artists. As well as representing the developing careers of several award winning photographic artists, OPEN DOORS believes in making art accessible, affordab

le and obtainable. We aim to surprise people by challenging what they believe photographic art to be whilst also respecting the more traditional photographic methods. Art is for all and our aim is to show art lovers that photography is the perfect medium to explore and to collect. Open Doors has a strong presence online () choosing to showcase a wide variety of styles from beyond our family of represented artists. Hoping to broaden people’s understanding of the medium. Whilst the digital side is important, we also believe wholeheartedly in the value of seeing and experiencing these artworks up close through our programme of exhibitions and art fairs that we host and participate in throughout the year.

04/08/2026

With under a week to get your submissions in to us, here are a few thoughts on preparing your work for our panel. First, the physical object.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August

With the OD Photo Prize we expect submissions from across the full spectrum of the medium, and where it fits the work, we encourage artists to include a few images that show the finished pieces as objects. Installation views, a framed or unframed print, the surface and its textures, the sculptural qualities, even a glimpse of process. In a medium that is famously screen-bound, showing the panel the physicality of your work is one of the clearest ways to set it apart, and it tells us how you intend the work to be seen. It needn’t be every image in the set. But in the age of AI, we think how a photograph exists as an object, and how it should be encountered, is one of the more important questions for the future of the form.

Chloé Milos Azzopardi [Chloe Azzopardi] understood this instinctively. A Judge’s Pick in 2023, her series Non-Technological Devices imagines strange, handmade instruments for living differently with the natural world, at the meeting point of documentary and fiction. In the years since, she has shown at Paris Photo, Rencontres d’Arles and Photo Élysée, taken up residencies at Villa Pérochon and Fondation Martell, and won support from the CNAP and the Fondation des Artistes. In 2027 she will hold a solo exhibition at the Museum für Photographie in Braunschweig. Represented in the UK by OD, she shows work from this series in our London group exhibition this September.

You can enter your work via the link in our bio.

30/07/2026

With only days left to submit, we feature Jieyu Deng whose series Pain No More was Longlisted for last year’s prize.

“Those red-stained sheets and indelible bruises have long since become part of my body.” Jieyu Deng

Deng traces a childhood illness and its aftermath through the building where she was born. Returning to her hometown in China after the pandemic, she found the flat renovated, the marks of twenty years painted over in white, and, among her mother’s old photo albums, the record of the illness she had survived as a child. Between the emptied building and the albums, she looks for the traces of what happened, and for a way forward from it.

Working entirely on film, experimentally processed in the darkroom, Deng draws on the Japanese photographers of the 1970s, using symbol and metaphor to give personal memory a visible form. Pain No More extends beyond the images into publications and doll installations.

Jieyu Deng was born in 2000 in Guangdong Province, China, and is a photographer and graphic designer based in Glasgow. She studied graphic design at the University for the Creative Arts and completed an MA in Photography at the The Glasgow School of Art.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August
Enter via the link in bio

See our website for Tips on how to prepare your submissions

29/07/2026

With the deadline approaching fast, a word for anyone deciding whether to enter, or whether to enter again. Today we feature Nina Hauben [NINA ANNA❜], who submitted her series Silent Dialogue to last year’s prize and has returned this year with the work evolved.

One of the most interesting patterns we’ve seen since 2021 is that some of our most successful artists have submitted the same project two or even three years running, refining it in between: new images in the selection, a reworked project description, and a fresh panel who read the work anew. In fact four of our past six winners did exactly that, as well as countless others who have gone on to be represented by OD or exhibited with us. The act of submitting is rarely wasted. It’s a chance to sharpen a project and see it again with fresh eyes.

Silent Dialogue continues Hauben’s exploration of memory and emotion. Where her earlier work dealt with absence, this phase turns toward presence, toward what remains, and a quiet search for connection. Working intuitively, rooted in reality and memory, she lets movement become a language, translating thought and feeling beyond (un)spoken words and opening space for stillness and renewal.

Nina Hauben is an artist based in Amsterdam, whose work serves as a visual translation of experience and emotion. It unfolds in phases, each a reflective space to return to, revealing subtle shifts in perspective over time.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August
Enter via the link in bio

28/07/2026

There are just a couple of weeks to go until deadline day. Here is another great discovery from last year’s Longlisted artists... Sebastian Alten and his submission, du sagtest quarzit / sagtest weiß.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026

“It is an attempt to preserve memories and pass them on from one generation to another.” Sebastian Alten

Sebastian Alten’s grandfather and his newborn daughter never met: he died two weeks after her birth, and Alten’s mother believes he waited for news of her arrival. du sagtest quarzit / sagtest weiß gathers traces of the past and carries them forward, drawn to the white quartzite scattered through the woods of his hometown, enduring where softer rock has eroded away, much as memory outlasts the people who held it.

Sebastian Alten (b. 1983) has a background in sociology and film production and his practice is rooted in analogue photography and darkroom printing.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026
Enter via the link in bio

24/07/2026

Concluding our takeover with gallerist Robert Morat, juror on this year’s OD Photo Prize, we feature work from German photographer Jörg Brüggemann [Jörg Brüggemann].

In Tres Viajes, shown at Robert Morat Galerie earlier this year, Brüggemann explores Chile across three separate journeys.

The first chapter, in 2018, was a search for his mother, who had died ten years earlier while he was travelling in South America. Following signs that had come to him in a dream, he crossed the continent to reach the place where the news had found him, using the camera the artist attempted to gather the pieces of that dream back together.

He returned in 2019 to a country in revolt. More than a million people were in the streets against a government that answered with force, and he named the series after Víctor Jara’s ‘El derecho de vivir en paz’, the song Chileans sang through the uprising, written by a musician the dictatorship tortured and killed in 1973. The last journey, in 2022, is quieter: a woman on the Chilean coast, a man in the mountains, held together somehow across the great distance between them.

The three journeys don’t resolve into an answer. They circle the same loss from different distances, and leave it open. Purposefully leaving the door open to interpretation and projection.

Jörg Brüggemann was born in 1979 in Herne and lives and works in Berlin. He has been a member of the Ostkreuz agency [OSTKREUZ Photographers Agency] since 2009 and teaches at its school in Berlin. His books include Metalheads, Autobahn and Tres Viajes.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026
Enter via the link in bio.

23/07/2026

Continuing our takeover with gallerist Robert Morat, juror on this year’s OD Photo Prize, we feature work from of British artist Hannah Hughes [].

“Uncertainty, doubt and precariousness are all built into my process of working”

Hughes cuts the often overlooked textural peripheries that decorate the backgrounds found in magazines and auction catalogues, and repurposes them into collages that behave like flat sculptures. The work began around 2014 as Flatland, after Edwin A. Abbott’s Victorian novella, and has since extended into further series such as Mirror Image and also into ceramics.

Hannah Hughes was born in 1975 and lives and works in London. She graduated from the University of Brighton in 1997 and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Gloucestershire, where her research covers collage, sculptural photography and ceramics. Her first book, Mirror Image, was published by Jane & Jeremy in 2023. Solid Slip, her first solo exhibition in Germany, opened at Robert Morat Galerie in 2024, marking the gallery’s twentieth anniversary.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026
Enter via the link in bio.

22/07/2026

With just a few weeks left to submit your work, we turn to one of our jurors... Robert Morat, founder and director of Robert Morat gallery in Berlin.

Robert has an exceptional eye and has been an inspiration to me for years. He regularly takes risks, and presents artists’ work with respect, elegance and a minimalism that few galleries are brave enough to achieve. Having him on the panel this year is an honour. Today, we begin a three-post series reflecting on recent shows that stood out to me and some of the fantastic artists on the gallery’s roster.

First to feature, Christian Patterson...

Gong Co. takes its name from a family-run grocery store in the Mississippi Delta, which Christian Patterson found still trading in 2003, its shelves stocked with long-expired goods. He returned for twenty years, photographing the store through its closure in 2013 and on to the day it was gutted in 2019. Alongside the photographs he made monotypes, trompe l’oeil collages and handwritten notes, so the work becomes less a record of a place than an object shaped by the same decay it documents.

Christian Patterson [Christian Patterson] is an American artist working across photography, books and installation, born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and based in New York. Self-taught, he moved to Memphis in 2002 to work closely with William Eggleston, spending three years with the Eggleston Trust, a lineage still visible in his colour and light. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Grand Prix Images Vevey, and the author of four books, including Redheaded Peckerwood and Gong Co.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026

This year’s OD Photo Prize offers a cash prize, a place in our London group exhibition, representation with OD, an interview with Tim Clark, a solo show in Spain via the InCadaqués Photo Festival Award, and, new for 2026, portfolio reviews for Longlisted artists. All judged by an exceptional international panel including gallerist Robert Morat... Good luck this year!

Picter FREE RANGE DANDI

21/07/2026

Done, deadline now sits right under the intro, quote follows it, and the footer date is gone:

There are just a few weeks to go until deadline day. Here is another fantastic project from last year’s Shortlisted artists... Jason Hendardy and his submission, Personal Technologies.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026

“What images and objects do we hold onto, and what makes us keep them?” Jason Hendardy

Jason Hendardy is an artist, photographer and writer based in Seattle, whose work moves across photographs, books and writing on how images produce meaning.

Personal Technologies investigates how images and objects shape American identity in a mediated age. A typology catalogues objects from Hendardy’s life as evidence of influence, from American consumer goods to artefacts carrying his family’s immigrant experience. Alongside it, the artist builds layered assemblages, arranging and rephotographing objects so each new pass adds another layer of meaning. What emerges is a portrait of selfhood built not from revelation, but from the slow accumulation of symbolic things.

Self-portraits complete the investigation, turning the lens on the artist himself and on photography’s own role in all this. The camera isn’t a neutral witness but one of the technologies shaping us, so the medium becomes complicit in the process it documents, another means by which we construct and understand ourselves.

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This years OD Photo Prize offers a cash prize, a place in our London group exhibition, representation with OD, an interview with Tim Clark, a solo show in Spain via the InCadaqués Photo Festival Award, and, new for 2026, portfolio reviews for Longlisted artists. All judged by an exceptional international panel... Good luck!

Picter FREE RANGE DANDI

15/07/2026

Over six editions the OD Photo Prize has become central to how we find the artists we work with. For example of the last nine artists Open Doors Gallery have shown at international fairs in London, Paris and Rotterdam, seven first came to us through the prize.

Submissions are open for just a few more weeks. Open themed, the prize welcomes a wide range of work from all around the world: from long-term documentary, portrait & landscape projects to work made in the studio and mixing different mediums. There is still time to prepare your work for us and our panel of industry pros.

This year the prize offers cash, a place in our London group exhibition, OD Gallery representation, an interview with , a solo show in Spain via the Award and, new for 2026, portfolio reviews for every Longlisted artist. All judged by an international panel.

Meet the jury in the comments below.

OD Photo Prize 2026 • Deadline 11 August
Link in bio to find out more

14/07/2026

There is less than one month to go until deadline day. Here is an eye-catching project from last year’s Longlist... Jón Helgi Pálmason and his submission, The Farthest North.

“It asks how landscapes hold stories, how they inform who we are, and what remains when a place continues without us.” Jón Helgi Pálmason

The series Yzta Annesið is the culmination of a five-year exploration of Melrakkaslétta, the northernmost region of Iceland, at the edge of the Arctic Circle. Rooted in personal heritage and a longing to reconnect, it moves between Raufarhöfn, his mother’s birthplace and a village shaped by the rise and fall of the Herring Years, and the surrounding countryside, where the vast, unyielding land becomes both subject and mirror. Through photography, archival material and found objects, the work asks how a place holds its stories, and what remains when it continues without us.

A note for entrants 📝 the prize welcomes projects from previous years, and artists who return with a reworked or expanded submission often find greater success the second time around. It can also help to include images of the work in physical form. Don’t be afraid to show exhibitions, prints and installed pieces alongside the series itself, as these can activate the jury’s imagination and bring your vision into focus.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026
This year offers a cash prize, a place in our London group exhibition, representation with OD, an interview with the influential Tim Clark, a solo show in Spain via the InCadaqués Photo Festival Award, and, new for 2026, portfolio reviews for Longlisted artists. All judged by an exceptional international panel... Good luck!

Picter FREE RANGE DANDI

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