There's more than one way into Ultraviolet. Whether you're putting work in front of us for the first time, looking for direct feedback on your practice, or watching for a themed call that fits what you're making, here's where to start.
shoot your shot
Interested in showing your work with us?
Cape Town has no shortage of photographers. What it has lacked, until now, is a gallery dedicated entirely to showing their work.
We founded Ultraviolet in 2025 to fill that absence. Cape Town's gallery scene is growing and vital, but photography, despite being the most widely practised art form in human history, had no permanent dedicated home within it. We are that home.
How to Get Involved
General Submissions
Send us a focused body of work for ongoing consideration. Every submission is looked at, considered, and kept on file: nothing expires after one no.
Portfolio Review
A paid, hour-long sit-down with our curator for honest, considered feedback on your work and your practice: not a fast-track to exhibition, but real, focused attention.
Open Calls
Themed calls for work on a specific idea or brief, announced periodically and open to anyone. Keep an eye on this page, or follow along, for the next one.
Peer Review Gatherings
Informal, in-person sessions where photographers bring current work to share and discuss with each other, hosted at the gallery. Bring prints or a laptop, come to look and be looked at. Open to all, free to attend.
Pop-Up Shows
Short-run, off-site exhibitions in found spaces around Cape Town: a chance to show work outside the gallery's four walls, drawn from general submissions and open call entries.
Schedule a curator review
Sit down with Dylan Culhane, Ultraviolet's director and curator, for a focused one-on-one look at your work, whether that's a small selection, a body of work, or your full portfolio.
Expect considered attention, honest feedback, questions that open up new angles, and connections you might not have spotted in your own work. It's also a chance to think out loud about your practice: to verbalise and concretise loose ideas, and sharpen how you present your work going forward.
FAQs
General submissions are free. A portfolio review with our curator is a paid, hourly session, but everything else on this page costs nothing to enter.
We aim to respond within 14 days if we'd like to see more of your work or talk further. If you don't hear from us in that time, it isn't a final no: every submission stays in our archive for future consideration.
Yes. If you have new or different work, send it through again: our programme evolves, and work that wasn't right before might be exactly right now.
No route on this page guarantees a show. What it guarantees is that your work is actually looked at and kept on file, not filtered out by an algorithm.
Dylan Culhane, Ultraviolet's director and curator, reviews every general submission personally. For Open Calls, we typically bring in a small selection committee to help manage volume and bring a broader range of perspectives; this varies with each call.
General Submissions are considered for exhibition and future opportunities at Ultraviolet. A Portfolio Review is a paid, one-on-one session for feedback on your work and practice: it isn't a submission for exhibition.
Yes. Location doesn't affect how we consider your work, though logistics like framing, shipping, and installation are easier to work out with local or South African photographers.
Come with a selection of images that speak for themselves; that's the first priority, and the next question covers it in more depth. Beyond that, come ready to talk about your work and articulate your vision and intentions.
It genuinely helps to be able to talk about the ideas behind your photography, even if you don't think of yourself as a writer. Try writing about your work; it has a way of externalising thoughts that are still taking shape. If you're submitting digitally, include a few sentences of context with your images.
One note: tools like ChatGPT can help organise your own ideas, but outsourcing your thinking to AI entirely is almost always obvious, and it won't do you any favours. Realness beats polished word salad, every time.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A common mistake is submitting too much: an oversized, wide-ranging portfolio can read as scattered rather than considered. As a photographer, you're your own first curatorial filter, and a tightly edited body of work shows real intention.
We suggest 10 to 20 images: enough to demonstrate range, restrained enough to stay focused. If we see promise, we'll ask for more. At this stage, less is more.
Prints are preferred. We're a gallery built around photography as a physical medium, so seeing your work on paper, even a small postcard-sized print, tells us far more than a JPG on a screen ever can. If you haven't printed your work before, it's worth asking whether you're ready to show it in a gallery.
That said, we understand printing isn't always possible, especially if you're based outside Cape Town. An online portfolio link works too, particularly as a preview before an in-person review. If you do bring a digital portfolio to an in-person session, bring a laptop: we don't review work on phones.
It's a hard question to answer briefly; to some extent, we know it when we see it. More concretely, we look for clarity of vision, originality, and technical control of the medium, ideally adding up to a distinctive voice beyond just years behind a camera.
Our curatorial agenda isn't fixed. We open submissions partly to discover work that helps shape and expand it. Assessment is ultimately subjective, based on a sense of fit within the gallery and our audience.
Roughly every month. Individual exhibitions typically run 6 to 8 weeks, often shown alongside a broader group selection of work.
Both. Our curator decides what fits best for each body of work. Often we'll print and frame a smaller selection for the gallery space, giving buyers a true sense of the work, while making a wider range available to browse and buy online.
