Issue 5 is now available: get yours here.
Thank you to everyone who submitted their photos. Stay tuned for future announcements.
Image credit: Veejay Villafranca
Salve is both a greeting and a balm. It speaks of welcome, care, solidarity, and the relationships we build across histories, borders, and differences. As with every issue of Tiga Mata, we encourage photographers to interpret the theme freely rather than literally.
There is no single “correct” response to Salve. We are interested in work that offers thoughtful, personal, and original perspectives.
Rather than trying to illustrate the word Salve, consider what it represents.
Your work might explore care, solidarity, memory, belonging, migration, cultural continuity, ecology, or resistance. It may also reflect on relationships between people, places, histories, or communities.
The strongest submissions often resonate with the theme without needing to explain it directly.
We are particularly interested in work rooted in local experiences and perspectives.
Whether your project examines everyday life, family histories, cultural traditions, environmental issues, identity, or social change, specificity often creates work that resonates beyond its immediate context.
You don’t need to photograph something extraordinary. Sometimes the most meaningful stories begin close to home.
Photography is not only about making new images. We also welcome projects that engage with archives, family albums, found photographs, vernacular imagery, and collective memory.
If you are working with existing photographs, think about why these images matter today. How does your project offer a new perspective or reveal overlooked histories?
Please ensure that archival or found materials are used thoughtfully, ethically, and with appropriate attribution where applicable.
We welcome projects developed through collaboration.
This may include shared authorship between artists, community-based projects, collaborations across cultures or disciplines, or work created through dialogue with participants.
We are interested in projects where collaboration meaningfully shapes both the process and the outcome.
Your project statement is an important part of your submission.
Rather than describing what is visible in the photographs, tell us why you made the work. What questions are you exploring? What motivated the project? Why is this work meaningful to you now?
A concise and thoughtful statement helps us better understand the context of your work.
Choose photographs that strengthen one another.
A carefully edited sequence of images is often more compelling than a larger collection covering similar ground. Think about pacing, relationships between images, and how the project unfolds as a whole.
Every photograph should have a reason to be included.
Salve is intentionally open to interpretation.
We welcome documentary, conceptual, archival, experimental, collaborative, and research-based practices. We are less interested in whether a project fits neatly into a category than in whether it offers an honest, thoughtful, and distinctive way of seeing.
The strongest submissions often leave us with new questions rather than simple answers.
