Submissions

Anyone working with photography as an art form. Owing to a finite amount of wall space and days in the year - as well as maintaining a high curatorial standard - we are naturally very selective about work we take on. That said, we're very interested in discovering new voices in photography, and would encourage anybody with ambitions of furthering their career as a photographic artist to send us work for consideration.

Evidence of an existing practice and a distinctive approach to the medium would work in your favour, but we're open to collaborating with artists at various career stages - whether it's well established or still in its formative stages. If you're reading this, you probably have some inclination towards getting your work out into the world... perhaps this is the sign you've been waiting for?

We do accept digital submissions via email,
but in-person reviews are preferable if you'd like to get feedback on your work. We endeavour to respond to every submission, but owing to the large number of submissions we receive, we can't offer in-depth responses via email.

Of course the first priority is your selection of images that speak for themselves (see the next question for more detail on this). Beyond this, please come prepared to talk about your work, and verbalise your vision and intentions.

Portfolio reviews aside, it's invaluable to be able to communicate the ideas informing your work when sharing it with others. We always suggest writing about your photography, even if you don't consider yourself a writer. It can really help externalise unformed thoughts swirling around in your subconscious. If you're submitting work digitally via email, please include a few sentences or paragraphs to add context to your submission.

Note: ChatGPT and other LLMs are useful to organise some of your existing ideas, but wholly outsourcing your thought process to AI is almost always detectable, and won't do you any favours. Realness always wins over an intellectual word salad.

Consider the maxim: A chain is as strong as its weakest link. A common mistake applicants make is attempting to demonstrate a wide ranging ability and an enormous portfolio of work to choose from. This can end up communicating a sense of disarray, and lack of a clear perspective. As a photographer, you are your own first curatorial filter, and evidence of time taken to cohere a focused body of work speaks to your intention as an artist.

To this end, we suggest submitting between 10 and 20 images for review; striking a balance between intentionality and restraint. If we see promise in this initial selection, we might request to see more work. In the initial stages of consideration however, less is more.

Here's the thing: JPGs on a screen and prints on paper simply aren't the same thing. As a gallery, we're ultimately focused on photography as a physical medium; exhibiting and selling printed work on paper. Prints are the ultimate manifestation of photography as an art form, and evidence of exploration in this realm certainly adds credibility to any application. In fact, it might be fair to say that if you haven't printed your work before you may not be ready for gallery exhibition. Simply stated, it's much easier to get a true sense of of your work in its final form, as opposed to a digital representation. You needn't bring in full size art prints - even small postcard prints ring more true than JPGs.

Having said all that, sometimes printing work isn't feasible, or you might live out of town, in which case you're more than welcome to send a link to an online portfolio. This is useful as a taste of what you have to offer even if you schedule an in-person review. But if at all possible, we do suggest going a little further in demonstrating your commitment to creating physical work by bringing in prints.

If you do set up an in-person review with an online portfolio, please bring your laptop along - our one hard rule is that we don't look at work on a phone.

The most obvious question is perhaps the hardest to answer succinctly. To some degree, we'll instinctively know it when we see it. More tangibly, we're looking for three key things: clarity of vision, originality, and technical control of the medium. Ideally these all add up to a distinctive expression of creativity that transcends pure experience as measured in years of taking pictures.

Our curatorial agenda isn't set in stone, and we open up submissions in order to discover interesting practices that help us define and expand this agenda.

Bear in mind that our assessment is subjective, ultimately based on an intuition of viability within a gallery context and - more specifically - the tastes of our specific audience.

We shift things around on the walls every month or so. Generally speaking, our exhibitions run between 6 and 8 weeks, but we'll frequently feature a specific exhibition in tandem with a more general assortment of work, effectively creating an ongoing group show.