Open Doors Gallery

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Open Doors Gallery

Championing emerging photographic artists Founded in 2017, OPEN DOORS GALLERY is a global platform for contemporary photographic artists.

The gallery aims to give the world’s best emerging talent an opportunity to reach new audiences, and works with a very broad range of artists. From unique collage and sculptural artworks to dark room creations, landscapes, portrait and street artists. As well as representing the developing careers of several award winning photographic artists, OPEN DOORS believes in making art accessible, affordab

le and obtainable. We aim to surprise people by challenging what they believe photographic art to be whilst also respecting the more traditional photographic methods. Art is for all and our aim is to show art lovers that photography is the perfect medium to explore and to collect. Open Doors has a strong presence online () choosing to showcase a wide variety of styles from beyond our family of represented artists. Hoping to broaden people’s understanding of the medium. Whilst the digital side is important, we also believe wholeheartedly in the value of seeing and experiencing these artworks up close through our programme of exhibitions and art fairs that we host and participate in throughout the year.

02/09/2026

Open Doors Gallery is delighted to present four works from Yurian Quintanas Nobel’s series The Ignorant Gardener, making their debut at Second Nature next week. All works available exclusively through Open Doors Gallery.

The Ignorant Gardener is a photographic project inspired by Constructivism, Ready-Made and Surrealism. By combining sculpture and photography, Quintanas Nobel creates images that defy conventional logic and challenge us to think about horticulture in new ways. The project also highlights how little contemporary generations know about this ancient craft.

Working on site, the artist constructs temporary sculptures from objects commonly found in a vegetable garden. Vegetables, tools, farming implements. Arranged in unexpected ways, focused on their appearance rather than their function. The garden itself becomes the backdrop. Once photographed, every object is returned to its original place. Each image is titled with a caption borrowed from the language of gardening books and catalogues, given a surreal twist.

Four works from the series will be on view at Second Nature, available to purchase for the duration of the exhibition and beyond.

For enquiries, prices or to reserve work ahead of the opening, contact [email protected]

Artist Yurian Quintanas Nobel

Second Nature
10—13 September, 2026
157 Regent’s Park Road, Chalk Farm, London

Private View: Wednesday 10 September
DM to RSVP and for more info see our website

17/08/2026

Fewer than 30 hours to go ⏳ In case you missed it, the deadline was extended to midnight, 18 August. This is the very last chance to get your work seen by our influential jury of gallerists, artists and curators.

Above, a selection of standout single images from artists who have submitted their projects to us this year. Explore more from them below.

Ayline Olukman • Ayline Olukman
Simen Lambrecht • Simen K. Lambrecht
Aindreas Scholz • Aindreas Scholz - Lecturer / Workshop facilitator / ARPS
Enzo Castellucci • Enzo Castellucci
David Zheng • David Zheng
Guillaume Fustec • Guillaume Chevalier Fustec
Alexis McKeown • Alexis McKeown | Canmore Photographer
Hobie • Hobie Minnebreuker
Arber Sefa • Arber Sefa
Joshua Mokry • Joshua Mokry

Good luck x

OD Photo Prize 2026
Final Deadline • 18 August
Enter via the link in bio

14/08/2026

The deadline was extended for just one week, so you have until 18 August to get your submissions in to us. Here is another look at an artist we discovered through the prize. Allan Salas and his stunning series Thorns.

“Thorns is a project that delves into the depths of pain, hardships, and resilience. It is a meditation on existence, uncertainty, and our innate desires for protection.” Allan Salas

Set against his surroundings in Costa Rica, Thorns continues Salas’s investigation into grief and the human condition. The thorn gives the series its emblem, at once a defence and a wound, the thing that protects and the thing that draws blood. Working close to the plants and textures of his native landscape, Salas builds images that hold that doubleness, tender and guarded at once, and finds in the natural world a language for the ways we shield ourselves from loss.

Allan Salas Moscoso [b. 1993] is a photographer based in San José, Costa Rica. Working between documentary and the poetic, his practice explores memory, loss and our relationship with the natural world, drawing on the landscapes around him to reflect on grief, endurance and the fragile ties that bind us to living things.

Prints are available via Open Doors Gallery

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 18 August
Enter via the link in bio.

08/08/2026

With the deadline almost upon us, today we take a look back at another of our previous winners. Sophie Gabrielle took the top prize in 2024 with Worry For The Fruit The Birds Won’t Eat.

“I was interested in archives that were connected to my family’s own story of diagnosis, treatment, recovery and death.” Sophie Gabrielle

The work began as a way of coping when all the male members of Gabrielle’s family were diagnosed with stage four cancer across two years. Searching medical archives tied to their illnesses, they gathered early X-ray and phototherapy images, experiments in radiation and UV light that were themselves once cancer-causing, and set them alongside medicinal botanicals, so past and present sit in the same frame.

The process is as bodily as the subject. Images are left under plates of glass to catch particles of the artist’s own skin, then rephotographed in layers, so the work becomes an abstract self-portrait, the cells altering the image into something new, a growth shaped by its surroundings. It is a series about rendering the invisible visible, and about photography as both life and memory held in one.

Sophie Gabrielle (b. 1993) is a contemporary photographer and curator living and working on the lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri people. Their work uses biomaterials, photographic archives and the human body to explore the connections between photography, history, memory and psychology.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August
Enter via the link in bio

07/08/2026

With just days left to enter, we continue to look back at a previous winners. Patricia Voulgaris won the OD Photo Prize in 2023 with her series When the Sun Hits.

“The OD Photo Prize allowed me to further advance my practice by providing the necessary funds to purchase equipment and enhance the quality of my work... The prize has been instrumental in fostering innovation and helping me reach a wider audience.” thisisnottricia

When the Sun Hits began at home. When Voulgaris’s father woke one morning with sudden, undiagnosable memory loss, her mother joked that aliens had taken his brain, and the remark, set against his own long fascination with ghost hunting and the paranormal, opened the series. Voulgaris is drawn to what sits just beyond ordinary explanation, and to the camera’s strange authority over it: is this a ghost, a reflection, or a trick of the light?

The work lives in that uncertainty, the seam between the real and the imagined, where photography both reveals the world and quietly deceives us about it. Voulgaris reaches back into memory and childhood to construct a private language for worlds that hover between truth and invention. As she puts it, she wants to believe the truth is out there on a small cloud in the distance, waving at her.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August
Enter via the link in bio

04/08/2026

With under a week to get your submissions in to us, here are a few thoughts on preparing your work for our panel. First, the physical object.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August

With the OD Photo Prize we expect submissions from across the full spectrum of the medium, and where it fits the work, we encourage artists to include a few images that show the finished pieces as objects. Installation views, a framed or unframed print, the surface and its textures, the sculptural qualities, even a glimpse of process. In a medium that is famously screen-bound, showing the panel the physicality of your work is one of the clearest ways to set it apart, and it tells us how you intend the work to be seen. It needn’t be every image in the set. But in the age of AI, we think how a photograph exists as an object, and how it should be encountered, is one of the more important questions for the future of the form.

Chloé Milos Azzopardi [Chloe Azzopardi] understood this instinctively. A Judge’s Pick in 2023, her series Non-Technological Devices imagines strange, handmade instruments for living differently with the natural world, at the meeting point of documentary and fiction. In the years since, she has shown at Paris Photo, Rencontres d’Arles and Photo Élysée, taken up residencies at Villa Pérochon and Fondation Martell, and won support from the CNAP and the Fondation des Artistes. In 2027 she will hold a solo exhibition at the Museum für Photographie in Braunschweig. Represented in the UK by OD, she shows work from this series in our London group exhibition this September.

You can enter your work via the link in our bio.

30/07/2026

With only days left to submit, we feature Jieyu Deng whose series Pain No More was Longlisted for last year’s prize.

“Those red-stained sheets and indelible bruises have long since become part of my body.” Jieyu Deng

Deng traces a childhood illness and its aftermath through the building where she was born. Returning to her hometown in China after the pandemic, she found the flat renovated, the marks of twenty years painted over in white, and, among her mother’s old photo albums, the record of the illness she had survived as a child. Between the emptied building and the albums, she looks for the traces of what happened, and for a way forward from it.

Working entirely on film, experimentally processed in the darkroom, Deng draws on the Japanese photographers of the 1970s, using symbol and metaphor to give personal memory a visible form. Pain No More extends beyond the images into publications and doll installations.

Jieyu Deng was born in 2000 in Guangdong Province, China, and is a photographer and graphic designer based in Glasgow. She studied graphic design at the University for the Creative Arts and completed an MA in Photography at the The Glasgow School of Art.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August
Enter via the link in bio

See our website for Tips on how to prepare your submissions

29/07/2026

With the deadline approaching fast, a word for anyone deciding whether to enter, or whether to enter again. Today we feature Nina Hauben [NINA ANNA❜], who submitted her series Silent Dialogue to last year’s prize and has returned this year with the work evolved.

One of the most interesting patterns we’ve seen since 2021 is that some of our most successful artists have submitted the same project two or even three years running, refining it in between: new images in the selection, a reworked project description, and a fresh panel who read the work anew. In fact four of our past six winners did exactly that, as well as countless others who have gone on to be represented by OD or exhibited with us. The act of submitting is rarely wasted. It’s a chance to sharpen a project and see it again with fresh eyes.

Silent Dialogue continues Hauben’s exploration of memory and emotion. Where her earlier work dealt with absence, this phase turns toward presence, toward what remains, and a quiet search for connection. Working intuitively, rooted in reality and memory, she lets movement become a language, translating thought and feeling beyond (un)spoken words and opening space for stillness and renewal.

Nina Hauben is an artist based in Amsterdam, whose work serves as a visual translation of experience and emotion. It unfolds in phases, each a reflective space to return to, revealing subtle shifts in perspective over time.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August
Enter via the link in bio

28/07/2026

There are just a couple of weeks to go until deadline day. Here is another great discovery from last year’s Longlisted artists... Sebastian Alten and his submission, du sagtest quarzit / sagtest weiß.

OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026

“It is an attempt to preserve memories and pass them on from one generation to another.” Sebastian Alten

Sebastian Alten’s grandfather and his newborn daughter never met: he died two weeks after her birth, and Alten’s mother believes he waited for news of her arrival. du sagtest quarzit / sagtest weiß gathers traces of the past and carries them forward, drawn to the white quartzite scattered through the woods of his hometown, enduring where softer rock has eroded away, much as memory outlasts the people who held it.

Sebastian Alten (b. 1983) has a background in sociology and film production and his practice is rooted in analogue photography and darkroom printing.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026
Enter via the link in bio

24/07/2026

Concluding our takeover with gallerist Robert Morat, juror on this year’s OD Photo Prize, we feature work from German photographer Jörg Brüggemann [Jörg Brüggemann].

In Tres Viajes, shown at Robert Morat Galerie earlier this year, Brüggemann explores Chile across three separate journeys.

The first chapter, in 2018, was a search for his mother, who had died ten years earlier while he was travelling in South America. Following signs that had come to him in a dream, he crossed the continent to reach the place where the news had found him, using the camera the artist attempted to gather the pieces of that dream back together.

He returned in 2019 to a country in revolt. More than a million people were in the streets against a government that answered with force, and he named the series after Víctor Jara’s ‘El derecho de vivir en paz’, the song Chileans sang through the uprising, written by a musician the dictatorship tortured and killed in 1973. The last journey, in 2022, is quieter: a woman on the Chilean coast, a man in the mountains, held together somehow across the great distance between them.

The three journeys don’t resolve into an answer. They circle the same loss from different distances, and leave it open. Purposefully leaving the door open to interpretation and projection.

Jörg Brüggemann was born in 1979 in Herne and lives and works in Berlin. He has been a member of the Ostkreuz agency [OSTKREUZ Photographers Agency] since 2009 and teaches at its school in Berlin. His books include Metalheads, Autobahn and Tres Viajes.

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OD Photo Prize • Deadline 11 August, 2026
Enter via the link in bio.

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http://www.opendoors.gallery/

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