OPEN ECO

OPEN ECO brings together 20 artists selected through an international open call, each presenting a single photographic image in response to one question: how can photography make a difference to the climate crisis?

Rather than offering one answer, the exhibition brings together twenty perspectives on a rapidly changing world. The photographs move between intimate encounters with place and landscape, observations of environmental change, questions of responsibility and extraction, experiences of loss and displacement, and visions of resilience, adaptation and possible futures.

Some draw our attention to what is already changing around us; others ask us to consider what might be lost, what might endure, and what kinds of futures we are capable of imagining. Together, they demonstrate photography’s ability to not only document environmental change but also to make complex and often distant issues feel immediate and personally tangible.

The single-image format also asks us to consider what a photograph can do within a wider conversation. An image can act as evidence, testimony, warning or invitation. It can make visible what is overlooked, connect a local experience to a global condition, or encourage us to look again at the environments we inhabit every day. Across the exhibition, the photographs create a conversation that moves between warning, observation, imagination, resistance and hope.

This is where OPEN ECO connects to FEEDBACK LOOP, the theme of Photo Fringe 2026. A feedback loop is shaped by exchange: one action produces a response, which in turn produces another. Here, each photograph enters into a similar process. Images speak to one another across differences in geography, experience and photographic approach, while the act of looking becomes part of that exchange. What we notice, question or carry with us beyond the exhibition can become another link in the loop.

Presented outdoors at the Seafront Gallery in Brighton, the photographs also encounter the environment they contemplate. Their setting by the coast brings questions of landscape, weather, human intervention and environmental change into the everyday experience of the exhibition. The works are not encountered in isolation, but as part of a shared place and changing landscape.

OPEN ECO asks what photography can contribute to a climate conversation—and what might happen when twenty different images, perspectives and possibilities are placed in dialogue.

Find out more about the participating artists and images below

Mark Phillips
Kerstin Rudnick
Aindreas Scholz
Kate Weybret
Mónica Almereyda
Jeremy Dennis
Ann Petruckevitch
Richard Chivers
Halfdan Hallseth
Nina Maria Allmoslechner
Gil Mualem-Doron
Alex Robertson
Wendy I. Hardie
Louise Beer
John Hooper
Dmitry Stepanenko
Britta Kohl-Boas
Kaoru Shibuta
Nasrah Omar
Rebecca Goddard

Image above: Mark Phillips, The Rhone Glacier retreats - from the series 'Asymmetries' (2022)