Open Eye Gallery

19/06/2026

We are proud to be the winners of the Liverpool City Region Culture & Creativity Awards 2026 in the Community Cohesion category! The Awards recognise and celebrate the incredible contribution that culture and creativity make to the city region.

Sarah Fisher, Open Eye Gallery’s Executive Director, said: “With ‘gallery’ in our name, many people are not aware of our work with communities, which is over 50% of our programme. We have a national lead for Socially Engaged Photography, and our value-driven work brings photographers together with communities over a period of time to co-create work that is meaningful to them.

Many of these communities don’t feel heard. Our programme in 2025 was an excellent example of how, through these collaborations, communities can have a public voice for the first time and through exhibitions, the broader communities can better understand their perspectives.

Here are only some of the projects we've worked on: https://openeye.org.uk/community-cohesion-finalist-2026/

16/06/2026

Are you based in Wigan and Leigh? Follow our Open Eye Hub page to be the first to know about local events and opportunities from us!

For example, we’ve partnered with brilliant photographer and filmmaker Christopher Nunn to create a new project, Humans of Wigan, capturing the people and communities that make the borough great.

On Saturday 20 June, and Saturday 11 July, Christopher and the team will be hosting Pop Up Portrait Studios in Leigh and Wigan. We want as many people as possible to get involved in this project – so we’d love you to come down!

You can come solo, or with friends and family – Christopher will chat with you about how you want to set up the shot to get an image that you’re most happy with. Wear your favourite clothes, hat, sports team shirt or bring along an item that means something to you to really illustrate who you are. You’ll also get a copy of the photo to take away on the day!

If you know someone else who is a real character from round ‘ere, or involved with a local sports team, social group, or community organisation, please share this invitation with them, or direct them to us. Let’s all get stuck in and showcase the diverse, the wacky, and the wonderful.

Your photograph might also end up as part of a new exhibition that will be shown locally in exhibitions later this year.

When and where:
Saturday 20 June / 11am–3pm / Open Eye Hub, Leigh Town Hall
Saturday 11 July / 11am–3pm / Makinson Arcade, Wigan

RSVP:

Have your picture taken for free by a professional photographer - come along by yourself, with friends or with family

12/06/2026

Just one weekend to see Fieldwork / Level: on until 14 June.

The final project outcomes from the graduating artists from the BA (Hons) Digital Imaging and Photography programme at Hugh Baird College and the Photography and Social Practice BA (Hons) programme at UCEN Manchester.

Works by:

📸 Euan McDonnell, Jeff Starley, Joe Seddon, Melissa Carrabyne, Nicole Hughes, Nina Karetska, Stuart Cassidy, Taryn Whitehead.

📸 Adam Tellouche, Scarlett Peet, Hollie Whelan.

11/06/2026

Coming soon: Is this a Garden? and The Perfect Flower

Launch: 25 June, 6pm / RSVP at Eventbrite
Exhibition continues: 26 June – 31 August

🌿 Is this a Garden? is curated by Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps. For this exhibition, they’ve been looking at the gardens as the backdrop to everyday life.

You’ll see works by fourteen contemporary artists, where gardens appear embedded within everyday life. Alongside these works sits John Goodwin’s archive of incidental garden photography. Collectively, the works ask how gardens shape the people around them, and equally, how social conditions, histories and environments shape the gardens themselves.

Additionally, there are works from the Open Eye Gallery Archive, including works from the 1984 exhibition Parks and Gardens. This selection focuses on allotments, our relationship to and with plants, as well as social practices of gifting flowers.

In partnership with The Centre for Research in Art & Design at Birmingham City University.

🌸 The Perfect Flower

Upstairs, Gallery 3 shows Yan Wang Preston The Perfect Flower project, including photographs, a projection and a short film. The exhibition in this room charts the development of hydrangeas in the UK, starting from a reproduction of the oldest hydrangea specimen in Britain. It explores what a perfect flower is and the journey to get it.

This project is part of The OFFSHOOT Artist in Residence programme, which is a collaboration between University of Salford Art Collection, RHS Garden Bridgewater and Open Eye Gallery, generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

10/06/2026

Open Call: Manchester Gardens by Manchester Photography Collective x Open Eye Gallery

Manchester Photography Collective is inviting members to submit photo-stories for a collaborative showcase with Open Eye Gallery as part of their summer exhibition programme.

Selected work will be displayed on the Open Eye Gallery Digital Window Gallery alongside the summer exhibition ‘Is This A Garden?‘.

We are looking for thoughtful and visually engaging photo-stories exploring people’s relationships with gardens and green spaces. This could include community gardens, allotments, parks, balcony or backyard gardens, wellbeing, environmental action, or the people and communities shaping urban green spaces.

Open to anyone following Manchester Photography Collective.
Deadline: 17 June
Submit here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXapnXjD_GEvCpy0RPqSydce-BOKgCApqHS8H5EwKWOcbW1A/viewform?pli=1

03/06/2026

Last few days to see our current exhibition, Self-Defined! On until 7 June, open 10am – 5pm, free, all welcome!

A “first attempt,” says curator Viktoria Bavykina, ”in our long-term work with photography archives from countries occupied or influenced by the Soviet regime,” Self-Defined mines the “histories, legacies, and lives shaped by years of totalitarian and imperial rule.” The result is a poignant, sometimes speculative, coming together of family stories, including: an exploration of post-Second World War displacement in Poland and Ukraine; the history of the Crimean Tatars in the 20th century; rural life in Latvia; collages of Soviet tourist photographs, and family archives. Catch it while you can.
(From The Double Negative Culture Diary)

Images by Rob Battersby

02/06/2026

Join us to celebrate the final project outcomes from the graduating artists from the BA (Hons) Digital Imaging and Photography programme at Hugh Baird College and the Photography and Social Practice BA (Hons) programme at UCEN Manchester.

Launch: Thursday 11 June, 5.30pm – 7.30pm
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1990873219392
Exhibition continues: 11 June – 14 June

The resulting projects use various approaches – documentary, conceptual, staged, autobiographical, and interdisciplinary. They ask questions of identity, memory, place, environment, representation, and belonging, while also challenging viewers to reconsider familiar perspectives.

Works by:

📸 Euan McDonnell, Jeff Starley, Joe Seddon, Melissa Carrabyne, Nicole Hughes, Nina Karetska, Stuart Cassidy, Taryn Whitehead.

📸 Adam Tellouche, Scarlett Peet, Hollie Whelan.

This exhibition is a continued celebration of Open Eye Gallery’s ongoing relationship with Hugh Baird College and UCEN Manchester. We are delighted to be supporting new photographic talent at the beginning of their artistic careers.

28/05/2026

Archival research and multimedia mockumentary storytelling: Death of Lucretia by Andrii Dostliev. Part of Self-Defined exhibition, on at Open Eye Gallery until 7 June 2026.

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A speculative work that balances archival research and multimedia mockumentary storytelling is based on the archive of commercially produced tourist photographs from the small town of Sviatohirsk in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine, which I have been collecting for several years. For decades (at least from the mid-1920s to the early 1990s), a local photography studio sold photographic souvenirs to tourists visiting a local resort.

These photographs included a variety of photo manipulation practices ranging from painted backdrops and hand-colouring of the photographic prints (which were quite common for the respective era) to an unprecedented for Soviet Ukraine commercial photography way of creating composite images made of two different negatives: a portrait of an individual or a group of people taken either outdoors at a random location or even in a studio and an iconic local vista of a Sviatohirsk monastery located on a mountain.

I choose to tell their story as ‘vernacular modernism‘ that existed in indirect opposition to the official modernist project of the Soviet state, drawing on, among other sources, texts by contemporary Ukrainian photography researchers and Renaissance paintings.

Text: Andrii Dostliev
Images: Rob Battersby

Co-commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection and Open Eye Gallery.

With contributions by Polina Baitsym, Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk, Olena Chervonik, and Zhenia Moliar.

27/05/2026

Upcoming events at Open Eye Gallery

📆 Thursday 28 May: the gallery is closed to the public as we're having a symposium. Tickets are still available!
Symposium programme and tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989988652629

📆 Friday 29 May: an informal brunch for potential young board members to meet the team: 11 am–1pm
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1988487669147

📆 Sunday 31 May, 1pm: curator's tour of our current exhibition, Self-Defined. Just two weeks left to see this exhibition!
Free, drop in.

📆 Sunday 31 May, 2pm: book presentation and in conversation with Belarusian poet Hanna Komar. We will be discussing solidarity, peaceful protests, collective experiences and experimental writing.
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989315684764

22/05/2026

Animals in the yard, children playing, celebrations, cabbage fermenting, cemetery visits, and gardening: Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska, House Near the River, 1964-2010, Latvia. Part of Self-Defined exhibition, on at Open Eye Gallery until 7 June 2026.

***
Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011) emerged from the Latvian amateur photo club “Rīga” in the mid-1960s as a distinct artistic voice.

Her practice was marked by experimental photograms, photomontage, staged photography, and an aesthetic of the everyday, as well as internationally exhibited n**e portraits. Dzividzinska’s works offered a perspective on women that diverged from the prevailing Latvian amateur photo club aesthetics of the time.

In the mid-1970s, Dzividzinska moved away from the photo club environment to focus entirely on graphic design. As participation in photo clubs was an amateur pursuit that offered no financial return, her work in applied design provided the family’s primary source of income. Consequently, the artist's archive remained largely dormant and unnoticed by the Soviet art establishment for nearly twenty years, as her unembellished self-portraits and documentation of everyday life were viewed as having little artistic value.

It was only through Dzividzinska’s late-career ‘autobiographical impulse’ and shifts in the Latvian photography practices that her early negatives and prints were reawakened in the mid-1990s. The documentary series House by the River (1964–2010), which documented daily life in her ancestral home in the countryside (Iecava), took shape during this period. By 2010, Dzividzinska and her daughter, photography scholar Alise Tīfentāle, had compiled a mock-up for a book chronicling a creative career spanning nearly fifty years.

Today, this ‘archival body’ continues to take on new shapes through the active engagement of curators, scholars, and artists who utilise it as a site for academic and practice-led research.

Text: Līga Goldberga
Images: Declan Connolly, Rob Battersby

In collaboration with the National Library of Latvia.