Calls for Entry: Can Contests Help Us Grow as Artists?
How I'm going to use Calls for Entry to boost creativity (and you can too).
This is the start of a series of posts and videos called “Calls for Entry.” (Calls for entry are notices for artists to enter contests, book submissions, gallery shows and more.)
I used to scoff at these types of things. I was too good for them, Id tell myself. “Contests and gallery shows are scams.”
In reality, I’ve always been terrified of success and horrified by rejection, which has been a problem…
I’m going to change that. One of the questions I’ll be trying to figure out is this: how do we challenge ourselves as photographers to not only get better, but to find our artistic, creative voice?
These last couple years, I think I’ve taken the easy route: go to pretty places. Take pretty pictures.
Flower. Landscape. Tree. Leaf. Butterfly. Owl. REPEAT
I want to get beyond that and push myself again, and one of the ways I’m going to do that is to is to start entering calls for entries…
If you don’t know…. calls for entry are notices for artists to enter competitions, gallery shows, book entries, and more. The Center for Photographic Art (and many others) have direct pages to many of these:
I’m NOT doing this to win awards or get published and stuff, (although that would be AWESOME), but mostly I want to push myself forward artistically. You can too. That’s what this series is - US doing this together, sharing our wins and learning opportunities!
Let’s start this series by entering a contest going on RIGHT NOW:
TRAVEL WITH OM SYSTEM is a good one to start with because it’s free (so you should enter it), and you can use any camera or system. The contest crazy simple: it asks us to submit one travel or street photo. the only description for what they are looking for is “the world is your canvas.”
Travel photography can really be anything, right? And how do we define street photography? I think theres’s space to get creative here and define things on our own.
Here’s something I recommend - don’t immediately go and research what everyone else is doing. You’ll see at the bottom of the OM SYSTEM contest page a bunch of entries. Ignore those, at least at first.
When we immediately start researching, it’s hard not to start comparing ourselves to others. When I do this, for instance, I feel like my photos suck, or they’re too weird, or no one will like me, and all my hopes and dreams are going to die. Pretty soon I’ve decided I hate contests again and I don’t enter.
Don’t be me. Instead, sit with it for a little bit and think about the entry requirements. OM SYSTEM’s description says “the world is your canvas,” so I’m personally going to focus on that.
The idea is: how can we make this (or any) contest more about challenging ourselves, or learning new things, or developing our voice? Can we do them all at the same time?
At the end of the day, who cares? I just want to have fun and try something new… so how can I do something cool with this contest?
I JUST bought a new lens for my OM-3, the 45mm 1.8, so I want to mess around with that. I also borrowed a 24-mm tilt-shift lens for GFX. (GFX and M43 go compliment each other incredibly well). Since I also rarely do night photography, I want to combine all of this into one big photography soup.
I’ve got my gear, now I need a plan.
A few days of fog comes to the area, and I decide this is GO TIME.
I head out thinking about travel photography. I travel all the time in the country. So on this foggy night, I imagine I’m a lost traveler in rural Nebraska, the night swallowing the light, and any sign of life… gone. No road signs. Lights on, but no people. Just endless darkness…
I’m driving for days. The sun never rises, and all roads lead here, to this church…
Is any of this “travel photography?” Probably not to others, but for me, maybe travel photography is the way I document my descent into nightmares…
I leave the church, and I finally find my way home, driving through the city streets of Omaha. I feel like a kid, telling stories of what might be hiding in the night, just outside of the frame.
I’m inspired by kids-on-bikes stories like Stranger Things, and I remember my friends and I racing through the streets, running from imaginary monsters. and, while we would never admit it, we were always afraid of the things in the shadows.
Now, I’m 50, and somehow, that little kid who found the night wonderful and mysterious is still in me… the only difference is that now I know the monsters are real.
Okay, so what do you think? Are any of these street or travel photography?
Who cares?
This one totally random #travelwithOMSYSTEM contest, can be used to as a reason to DO. To get out. To try something new.
AND - you never know. You might win! I learned in college that a great way to succeed was to stand out from everyone else. I knew that most of my peers were writing boring, formula-driven essays, for instance. So I would make sure to add as much personality, humor, and interesting stuff that might wake that professor up. It might not be great, but at least it was me, and a ton of my teachers loved that.
What that means is that by BEING YOURSELF and finding unique ways to tackle competitions and other calls for entry, I think you’ll have a better chance to stand out. (That’s what I’m trying to do, so it BETTER work!)
Authenticity, voice, and our personal, weird, totally unique story is what matters. Use Call for entries to keep exploring this!
Below are some links for you to bookmark and start looking through so you can find fun and challenging ways to move forward artistically:
Don’t forget to look for galleries in your region. There are many calls for entry that only focus on local artists, and might not show up on the bigger lists.
CAFE (Call for Entry for all art)
The Open Call (Paid, but looks like some good stuff)
email: jerredz@gmail.com