What happens when we stop thinking of landscape photography simply as pictures of beautiful places?

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LAND is an international call for photographs in which place itself commands our attention.

We welcome the traditional landscape—the mountain, forest, desert, field, coastline, and open sky—but LAND extends beyond the untouched natural world. We are equally interested in cultivated and inhabited places, altered environments, industrial terrain, intimate landscapes, and the edges where nature and human intervention meet.

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Urban photography is welcome when the environment itself is the subject: the shape of a neighborhood, the character of a street, the relationship between buildings and open space, or the ways people have transformed the places they inhabit.

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The photographs do not need to make an environmental argument or carry a prescribed narrative. They may be beautiful, unsettling, quiet, monumental, abstract, intimate, damaged, ordinary, or strange.

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A photograph may succeed because of what it says about our relationship to the land. But it may also succeed simply because of the intelligence with which the photographer has seen: through composition, light, color, scale, atmosphere, form, or an unexpected understanding of place.

Beauty is welcome. So is everything that complicates it.

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For LAND, we are looking for exceptional photographs across the full range of contemporary landscape practice—from expansive vistas to fragments of terrain, from places seemingly untouched by us to environments bearing unmistakable evidence of our presence.

People may appear. Buildings may appear. Roads, machines, structures, and other signs of human activity may appear. But ultimately, the place is the subject.

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Juror — Douglas Beasley

Photographer Douglas Beasley will select the photographs for LAND and determine the award recipients.

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Beasley's photographic practice has long explored landscape, spirituality, nature, and the relationship between the external world and our internal experience of it. For LAND, photographers are invited to submit their strongest work and allow the juror to determine what a contemporary landscape exhibition can become.

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What We Are Looking For

LAND is open to photographers working in all photographic processes and approaches, including traditional and contemporary landscape, wilderness, rural and agricultural environments, intimate landscape, altered and constructed environments, industrial landscape, environmental photography, abstract interpretations of land, and urban environments in which place is the primary subject.

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There is no requirement to create new work specifically for this exhibition.

Send us the landscapes you consider among your strongest photographs.

Not simply the most beautiful places you have encountered.

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Show us how you see the world.

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Photographers retain all rights, including copyright, to their photographs. We will never distribute your photographs to anyone without your permission. You grant Decagon Gallery the right to publish your photograph in our online exhibition, in the exhibition catalog, and to promote the exhibition in social media and newsletters.