Persevere: An Outdoor Exhibition and Projection Event
The Click! Photography Festival wants to know how photography helped you survive 2020–2021. For many, the camera served as a tool of therapeutic intervention during the pandemic. Whether via a cell phone, DSLR, or 4X5, a camera helped rebalance and care for your emotional, spiritual, artistic, and mental needs. The process of creating a photographic image soothed our souls. Click! wants to exhibit and share the images that you created for your own well-being in an outdoor exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park. The selected images will be exhibited at NCMA for the month of October and ALL images submitted will also be projected in the museum’s auditorium before Titus Brooks Heagins’s keynote presentation and at other projection events during the Click! Festival.
Survival in the blur of 2020 and 2021 came from conscious decisions to not be silenced! Artist photographers and lay image makers grasped for their own sanity and led the charge for others to not be silenced. Creativity became a necessity for endurance and our collective survival. The past months were the progenitor of beautiful art, protest art, that etched its way into our consciousness as photographic images were plastered into our collective psyche. Artists experienced the pandemic through trauma expressed in anger, fear, and exhaustion. But most of us lived in a deep and dark cavern of economic insecurity. Museums closed, galleries shuttered their doors, state and regional art agencies shifted priorities, collectors disappeared. Our only means of surviving the world—speaking truth to life—was our only lifeline. So, we continued to photograph without means or expected ends.
Click! wants to share your response to our times, a selection of visual responses to our failures and the ruptures in our world, but also how we expressed love and cared for ourselves and each other. If that was walks in the woods, protest images, your garden growing, images of isolation, moments of self-reflection or the essential workers of our times, everything created during this time will eternally be connected with this unique chapter in history.
The Persevere Wall will serve as visual evidence of photography’s intervention and interpretation of a challenging time, proof of what its transformative role had during a time of crisis and isolation. Please submit your images that show what you turned your camera to.

Submission Guidelines

Click! encourages artists to submit up to 5 images. Submission details will be available on our website. 
Entry Fee: $45
Our Jurors
Jennifer Dasal is Curator of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the host of the independent podcast ArtCurious, which she started in 2016 and was named one of the best podcasts by O, The Oprah Magazine and PC Magazine.
de’Angelo Dia is a poet, theologian, and doctoral candidate at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Dia investigates public opinion and contemporary beliefs on cultural, social-political, and theological issues through poetry, visual art, and performance.

Application Requirements

Eligibility Criteria