Theme for Guest Room

Theme for Guest Room

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. David Campany, teacher at the University of Westminster London and Curator at Large for the International Center of Photography in New York, has chosen to collaborate with Taous Dahmani, who is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator specializing in photography.

Together, they have developed the following framework for your submissions: The "Meanwhile".

More than ever, we live in a world of "meanwhile": parallel lives, contemporaneous existences, different states of mind occurring side by side. We go about our lives while knowing - or pretending we don’t know - what other people are doing, accepting or denying our interconnectedness across the world. The "meanwhile" has become a great challenge to our sense of self as individuals, as communities and as global citizens. It shapes nearly every aspect of the visual culture we have made for ourselves. And even when the "meanwhile" doesn’t shape it directly, it is shaping our engagement with it. It is also difficult to photograph. How can the "meanwhile" be pictured?

Why submit to Guest Room?

• Be discovered by two experts in contemporary art and photography
• Get published in an online showcase on Der Greif alongside emerging artists from all over the world
• Submit for free or pay a voluntary donation of 6€
• Please note: Images which have been selected for a previous Der Greif opportunity are not eligible for re-submission. We want to support the broadest range of photographers possible and therefore encourage you to submit work that has not yet been selected by our past Guest Curators. Any images which do not comply with these terms will be removed from the selection process.

Voluntary donation

After over a decade of serving the international photography community Der Greif is now finally a registered non-profit. We believe this organizational structure best reflects our artistic and cultural mission. As always, your artistic contribution makes our work on Der Greif possible.

Since starting Guest Room in January 2015, we’ve been working hard to invite a broad range of practitioners, from gallerists to editors and curators. We are convinced that this format is an interesting and low-barrier approach to help artists get their work in front of people who might be interested in working with them. For this reason, we are asking you to consider making a financial contribution as well. That’s why we’re suggesting a voluntary donation of 6 € as a submission fee. 100% of the funds we collect from your donations will go towards helping us continue providing interesting opportunities for the photography community through Guest Room, and thus expand Der Greif.

We believe in inclusivity. We don’t want this suggested donation to stand in the way of your submission. If you are unable to contribute financially, please send an email to voucher@dergreif.org to receive a voucher code which will allow you to enter for free.

About David Campany

David Campany is a curator, writer, editor, and educator. He teaches at the University of Westminster London, and is Curator at Large for the International Center of Photography, New York.

David has worked worldwide with institutions including MoMA New York, Tate, Whitechapel Gallery London, Centre Pompidou, Le Bal Paris, ICP New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Photographer’s Gallery London, ParisPhoto, PhotoLondon, The National Portrait Gallery London, Aperture, Steidl, MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, MACK and Frieze.

Recent curatorial projects include William Klein: Yes. Photographs, Paintings, Films 1948-2013 (2022), ACTUAL SIZE! Photography at Life Scale (2022); A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload (2022); Gillian Laub: Family Matters (2021); Alex Majoli: SCENE (2019); The Still Point of the Turning World: Between Film and Photography (2017). In 2020, David curated the three-city Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie 2020 – The Lives and Loves of Images (Mannheim/Ludwigshafen/Heidelberg, Germany), working with 70 artists from 13 countries.

David’s many books include, among others, Indeterminacy: Thoughts on Time, The Image and Race(ism), co-written with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (2022), Victor Burgin’s Photopath (2022), On Photographs(2020), So Present, So Invisible – conversations on photography (2018), A Handful of Dust (2015), Walker Evans: the magazine work (Steidl 2014), Gasoline (MACK 2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (MIT Press/ After all 2010).

About Taous Dahmani

Taous Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator specialising in photography. Her academic research focuses on the photographic representation of struggles and the struggle for photographic representations. Her projects mainly involve the links between photography and politics - such as the visual culture of protests, migratory narratives and intersectional feminist discourses. She has published in various scientific journals and regularly gives papers in academic conferences. She also writes for art magazines and is frequently invited to hold public ‘in-conversations’ with photographers. Dahmani is Content Editor for The Eyes, a trustee of the Photo Oxford Festival and on the editorial board of MAI: Visual Culture and Feminism. She was the 2022 curator of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. She is currently working alongside photographer Joy Gregory on a publication entitled Shining Lights. Black women in photography in the 1980’s-90's (MACK/Autograph ABP, Summer 2023).

About Der Greif Guest Room

Guest Room is a monthly online exhibition with open submissions curated in real-time by personalities from the international photography scene. Der Greif is an award-winning organization for contemporary photography. It is print-publication, online-publication, curatorial team and joint project all at once. Der Greif connects the digital and the analogue, exploring and expanding the borders and limits of image-distribution and -reception in the digital era.