Chennai Photo Biennale’s Open Call turns city into a gallery, showcasing 250 images from 37 countries

Imagine walking through a shopping mall, a sun-dappled park, or an intimate gallery and finding yourself stopped in your tracks by a photograph that conveys a lot. This is what you can expect from the second edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) International Photography Open Call, which has unfolded across three distinct venues in Chennai. Powered by SIGMA and supported by VR Chennai, Greater Chennai Corporation, and Avtar Foundation for the Arts, the showcase is a project of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation—the non-profit organisation behind India’s largest photography festival. The open call, which made its debut during the 2024 Biennale edition, has now been cemented as an annual feature in the foundation’s calendar, and Edition 2 has raised the stakes.

Three venues and about 250 photographs— here's what Chennai Photo Biennale has to offer this year

Over 9,400 photographs were submitted from 37 countries, spanning two categories: single images and photo stories. From that mountain of submissions, an international jury of curators, artists, and editors whittled the selection down to over 100 photographers, whose work— roughly 250 photographs in all— now graces three very different spaces across the city.

An interesting aspect of the CPB Open Call apart from the usual circuit of photography competitions is its resolutely open brief. There are no restrictions on theme, genre, or geography. Nature, portraiture, documentary, still life, landscape— all are welcome. Photographic work can be combined with other art forms such as performance, painting, audio, sculpture, or text.

Varun Gupta, founding director of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation, explains the philosophy behind the call. “The open call literally looks to do one thing, which is make it possible for any photographer from anywhere to submit photographs on any subject of any age. It’s not a competition per se—it is a call for looking at photographs.”

The jury process, he says, is democratic. Rather than a room full of opinionated panellists debating loudly, jurors rate submissions independently online via a leaderboard system.

As for dominant themes, Varun notes that while there is no single thread running through the work, certain preoccupations emerge. Climate change features prominently, as do works about personal loss, grief, and intimate family relationships. “Today, photography is not about the truth. It’s about helping an artist understand themselves.” This, he suggests, marks a meaningful shift from the photojournalism-heavy era of a decade ago, when the camera was primarily a tool for bearing witness to crisis.

"I don't think there was a common theme. It was a very serious form of the individual artist expressing what they felt. Here it's not the technique per se, but rather the story. It may be even out of focus, but that's not a bad photograph because there's a story in it. That's where Chennai Biennale is different — it's really the art form of them, using photography as the means to translate that," Seshan A from SIGMA.

Among the exhibiting photographers, Sugandha Garg presents work that combines analogue and digital techniques through handmade box cameras of her own construction—intricate devices fitted with 200 exposure points, inside, which she builds and photographs miniature worlds of her own making. “It’s basically a world I can play with for the rest of my life,” she says. The CPB Open Call marks the first public outing for this series, which she describes as having been “guarding like a lion” until now. “I could not have asked for a better opener.”

Yash Sharma, meanwhile, works with a very different preoccupation: anonymity and surveillance. His photographs obscure or manipulate the faces of his subjects—sometimes through digital layering, sometimes through physical elements such as trees or burning effects—to explore what he describes as the emotion of facelessness. “Facelessness also has an emotion of its own,” he says. Inspired in part by his experience of feeling constantly watched while shooting a documentary in Kashmir, his work asks how much personality can be conveyed without ever revealing a face.

One of the defining features of this edition is its use of multiple venues— a first for the open call. Rangaprasad R, associate director of Exhibitions at CPB Foundation, oversaw the logic behind distributing the work across such different spaces.

At the mall, a passerby with no particular interest in photography can glance up and be arrested by an image. At the gallery, more demanding, layered work rewards closer attention. At the park, large prints animate the outdoors without disrupting those who have come for a stroll.

Sustainability, too, has been woven into the production. Almost the entire VR Mall show uses recycled frames and foam boards from previous CPB exhibitions.

With participants ranging in age from 13 to over 70, and submissions arriving from as far as Chile and Germany, the CPB International Open Call is making a compelling case that photography remains one of the most democratic and emotionally alive art forms in the world.

The CPB International Open Call exhibitions are free and open to the public at VR Chennai (Anna Nagar), OSR Park (MRC Nagar), and Avtar Foundation for the Arts (MRC Nagar) until April 5.