Themeless (2023)

An Open Call With Nothing to Answer To

Removing the theme sounds like removing a restriction, and for photographers it partly is. For everyone downstream it makes the work harder. A theme gives jurors a shared axis of comparison, gives the eventual catalog a reason to be sequenced one way rather than another, and gives a viewer a question to hold while looking. Take it away and all of that has to be reconstructed from the pictures themselves. This exhibition collected thirty works from twenty-nine artists, credited between 2015 and 2023, and the useful thing about it is what it reveals rather than what it argues.

What a Theme Actually Does

A brief is a filter applied before the work is made. It tells photographers which parts of their existing practice to bring forward and, more consequentially, prompts some of them to make something new. That prompting effect is why themed calls produce work that would not otherwise exist, and it is also why they narrow the field: everyone is answering the same question, so the answers rhyme. A themeless call reverses both effects. Nothing new is prompted, and nothing rhymes.

Coherence Has to Come From Somewhere Else

With subject unavailable as an organising principle, the remaining candidates are formal and technical. Tonal range, print quality, the handling of edges, the decision about where to stand. Judging a themeless call therefore turns into an assessment of craft and intent rather than of interpretation, which is a more exposing standard for the work and a more demanding one for the juror. A picture cannot be carried by being a clever response to a prompt, because there is no prompt.

A Cross Section of Process

What a themeless catalog documents accurately is what photographers are actually doing at a given moment. Here that means predominantly archival digital printing, alongside a print made from a glass dry plate, a process that predates roll film and requires the photographer to coat and expose in a specific sequence. In a themed show that entry would read as a comment on the theme. Here it reads as evidence: somebody is still working this way, in the same year as everybody else's inkjet.

What Arrives When Nobody Specifies

The submissions to an open brief cluster anyway, which is the genuinely interesting finding. Photographers without instructions do not distribute evenly across all possible subjects. They return to a fairly small set: the figure, the road, weather, interiors with one person in them, and objects on tables. That clustering is a better description of contemporary practice than any themed exhibition can produce, because nobody was told to make it.

Why the Format Recurs

A themeless call functions as a control group for every other call a gallery runs. It shows what the themes are adding and what they are suppressing. TCG Gallery is an independent online photography gallery, and each juried exhibition remains part of a permanent public archive after its run ends, so this catalog can be compared directly against the themed shows on either side of it. Photographers can enter the current photography open calls directly.