To Make
in a Time Like This
A PLATFORM 2020 Guest-reviewed Open Call
A call for photographers and visual storytellers responding to what it means to live, endure and make during a time of rupture and uncertainty.
Applications close June 14, 2026
What does it mean to make when the ground beneath you feels uncertain?
Across Africa, SWANA and far beyond, artists are living and working through conditions that are not incidental to practice, but central to it. For some, that may mean war, displacement, censorship, political violence or economic collapse. For others, it may take the form of anxiety, grief, instability, exhaustion, precarity or the slow and intimate pressure of trying to continue when the world around them no longer feels steady.
For many, the space needed to make work: time, safety, privacy, stillness, trust, continuity, has been fractured or denied altogether.
When so much seems out of control, the question is not only what we make, but how. How do we gather ourselves enough to begin? How do we hold onto creative energy when so much has been depleted? What remains possible when certainty has fractured, institutions have failed to restrain wrongdoing and the future feels difficult to trust?
To Make in a Time Like This is an invitation to respond from within that condition.
Not from outside it.
Not once it has passed.
Not when the language is tidy or the meaning resolved.
But from the middle of it.
We are looking for work that is culturally rooted, politically awake and socially and economically grounded. Work that understands that images do not sit apart from history, but move through it. Work that feels alert to the times we are living through and honest about what it takes to keep making within them.
This is not a call for polished portfolios or finished positions. It’s a call for presence, for attention and for visual language that carries necessity.
“We suffer from an incurable malady: hope.”
— Mahmoud Darwish
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Photographers, visual storytellers and lens-based artists, at any stage of their practice, working from or in dialogue with Africa and SWANA.
By SWANA, we mean South West Asia and North Africa. -
We invite submissions that respond, in whatever way feels true to your practice, to the question:
What does it mean to make work in a time that so often works against making?
Your response may be documentary, conceptual, poetic, personal, political, experimental or in-between. It may speak directly to conflict, economic precarity, displacement and rupture, or to quieter forms of endurance, intimacy and attention.
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5-8 images, a short bio and a short written response to the theme.
Please note that written submissions should be in English. We warmly welcome applicants from across Africa and SWANA, and encourage you to write in your own voice, with English translation where needed.
Guest Reviewers
Submissions will be reviewed by PLATFORM 2020 founder Laura El-Tantawy, alongside an invited panel of artists, curators and practitioners from Africa and SWANA.
Lebanese-born photographer and visual storyteller whose work explores the aftermath of war and the unresolved histories she has lived through and witnessed in Lebanon and across the region.
Photographer, curator and founder of Gulf Photo Plus and now Photo Plus UK with a long-standing commitment to photography education, community and visual culture across the region.
Iranian visual artist whose work moves through identity, memory, displacement, exile and the poetic tension between absence and presence.Please complete the form below. We welcome thoughtful, honest and carefully considered submissions. The work does not need to be finished. It does need to feel intentional, necessary and grounded in lived experience. Applications close June 14, 2026. Selected artists will be contacted directly.
Questions?
If you’re unsure whether your work is right for this call or have a practical question about submitting, you’re welcome to get in touch: info@photoplatform2020.com
Selected submissions will form part of PLATFORM 2020’s growing community archive and may be featured on the platform, across our editorial channels and in future conversations, digital publications or curated presentations connected to the project.
This call is the beginning of an ongoing series of themed invitations grounded in culture, heritage and the social, political and economic realities that shape how we live and make.