Lens Culture International Exposure Awards discover, reward, and promote talented, new, emerging and established photographers from around the world.

They’re looking for exciting images from every continent, and from diverse points of view: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, street photography, nature, sports, fashion, poetic, personal, abstract and human.

An international jury of photography experts will review and judge every photo submitted.

This year, in addition to cash awards and other prizes, they have announced that all winning photographs will be featured in well-publicized International Exposure Awards traveling exhibitions at galleries in Paris, New York and San Francisco in 2011. (Additional international gallery venues may be announced soon.) The winning photographs will also get prominent, exclusive photo features in Lens Culture, giving them access and broad exposure to an enthusiastic, influential worldwide audience.

Six photographers will win top honors (3 Portfolio Awards, and 3 Single Image Awards). Additionally, 25 photographers (from either category) will win Honorable Mention Awards.

Last year, they received over 6,000 images from photographers in 48 countries on six continents! Many of the 29 winners from 2009 continue to achieve great success with their careers — winning other awards (including two World Press Photo Awards), signing publishing contracts, getting editorial assignments, group and solo exhibitions, artists residencies, and having their work collected by institutions and private collectors around the world.

The closing date is 20 Sptember 2010 and for further information please visit the competition website.

This competition meets all the standards set out in the Bill of Rights

Note that although Pro-Imaging will promote competitions sponsored by organisations which support the Royalty Free licensing model, this does not imply that Pro-Imaging support Royalty Free Licensing. Our only consideration in this report is compliance with the Bill of Rights for Photography Competitions. Competitions which pass the Bill of Rights do not -

• claim copyright
• seek waiving of moral rights
• fail to give a credit for all free usage.
• add, alter, or remove metadata from digital images
  
• seek usage rights other than for solely and exclusively promoting the contest. Note that a book, posters, cards, or a calendar are seen as legitimate ways of promoting the contest and defraying costs.
  
• seek free usage rights in excess of 5 years
• use the images commercially without the photographers agreement, and such commercial usage is to be rights managed and limited to 5 years.
• make it a condition of winning that an entrant must sign a commercial usage agreement.
• fail to publish all documents on the competition website that an entrant may have to sign
• fail to name the judges for this or last year's competition
  
• fail to explicitly state all the  organisations who will acquire rights to the images
• set a closing date more than 18 months after the contest launch date
• fail to make clear statements of rights claimed and how images are used.

© 2010 Bill of Rights Suppporters Group; Last updated on 19 August 2010

The above text concerning the Bill of Rights standards may be reproduced providing the Pro-Imaging copyright notice is displayed with a link to the Bill of Rights.

Some or all of text and images reproduced above has been extracted from the competition website for the purposes of promoting this competition.

NB. If the competition rules are changed after updated date shown above it is the competition organisers responsibility to notify Pro-Imaging of changes made. If Pro-Imaging is notified of rule changes by the organiser the competition rules will be reviewed again for compliance with the Bill of Rights.

Organisers should notify Pro-Imaging of updated rules by using this contact form.