This is Gender: Law & Justice invites photographers to explore how gender shapes legal systems—both visible structures like laws, courts, and policing, and the less visible forces of bias, economic exclusion, and social stigma. We’re calling for photography that uncovers injustice and offers new ways of seeing justice, challenging systems shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.
Law and justice have never been neutral. In today’s volatile political landscape, legal systems reflect the power of those who shape them. Laws can serve as tools of liberation or instruments of control. Justice depends on who is visible, who is heard, and who is silenced. Across the world, those demanding gender justice are met with legal crackdowns, while those in power manipulate the law to maintain dominance.
But justice is not confined to courts. It is contested in the streets, on social media, in homes, and in history books. Justice unfolds in village councils, community gatherings, and international tribunals. It exists in the quiet resilience of those navigating oppressive legal systems and in the loud defiance of those who refuse to accept them.
We encourage works that interrogate the following questions:
- Institutional
- How do courts, police, and governments uphold or deny justice?
- Who has access to legal representation, and who is excluded?
- Environmental & Spatial
- Where does justice happen? In a courtroom, a protest, a detention centre, a refugee camp?
- How do borders, surveillance, or urban planning shape who is protected and who is punished?
- Social Relations
- How does justice (or injustice) play out in families, workplaces, or communities?
- Who enforces norms, and who resists them?
- Personal & Embodied
- What does it mean to carry the weight of the law?
- How does legal status shape daily life?
- Who moves freely, and who lives under constant threat?
- Radical Visions
- What does a truly just world look like? How do we redesign legal systems that centre rights, respect, rehabilitation, fairness, compassion and care?
- How do feminist, indigenous, and decolonial approaches to law offer new ways forward?
Across regions, we are witnessing a coordinated rollback of rights where gender is being politicised and weaponised – used to divide, exclude and undermine progress. This competition is a space to visualise and reclaim gender justice. Photography becomes both testimony and resistance, capturing the tension between power and protest, between law and lived experience.
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