Open Eye Gallery

01/10/2025

Firehawks exhibition tour and portfolio reviews with Stephen King

Saturday 4 October / 1.30pm–3.30pm / Open Eye Gallery

free, drop in for the tour / RSVP at Eventbrite for a portfolio review (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/firehawks-exhibition-tour-and-portfolio-reviews-with-stephen-king-tickets-1716229321099)

Join us for the next Socially Engaged Photography Network’s North West regional meet-up with guest speaker and socially engaged photographer Stephen King, who will discuss his current exhibition on a gallery tour of Firehawks.

The exhibition tour will be followed by a Q&A with you, our audience.

We will also have optional one-one portfolio reviews, where we’d like to see your own photographic or socially engaged work if you’d like to share it with us. Please RSVP via Eventbrite and we’ll then send you a link to choose a 15-minute slot for your portfolio review.

We will all then come back together for a final group discussion.

Firehawks is a project which is the first of its kind and the culmination of years of research, beginning with a collaboration with Open Eye Gallery in 2021, where Stephen explored his own experience of firesetting. After collaborating with London Fire Brigade Firesetting Intervention Scheme, Northumberland Fire and Rescue Service and Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service as well as numerous conversations and workshops with individuals with lived experience, he has developed an exhibition of work borne out of his innate ability to listen and respond to people’s experiences and sensitively transpose their accounts into visual, metaphorical depictions.

30/09/2025

26/09/2025

Now open! 🎉

26 September – 16 November, Tuesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm. Free, all welcome!

🧡 Firehawks: exploring firesetting behaviour in children and young people (main gallery)

🧡 Next Up: an annual graduate exhibition of work from the MA in Socially Engaged Photography course (upstairs)

🧡 New Borders of My Body: tracing a metamorphosis that begins in trauma – the loss of limbs through war – and continues in water (outside walls)

🧡 50 Years of The Whitechapel Centre: an inspiring journey through the charity’s history and its vital role in tackling homelessness across five decades (atrium photography stands)

Images by Rob Battersby.

24/09/2025

Launching tomorrow!

Join us tomorrow, 25 September, 6–8pm, for the launch of our new shows.

🧡 Firehawks: exploring firesetting behaviour in children and young people (main gallery)

🧡 Next Up: an annual graduate exhibition of work from the MA in Socially Engaged Photography course (upstairs)

🧡 New Borders of My Body: tracing a metamorphosis that begins in trauma – the loss of limbs through war – and continues in water (outside walls)

🧡 50 Years of The Whitechapel Centre: an inspiring journey through the charity’s history and its vital role in tackling homelessness across five decades (atrium photography stands)

See you soon!

23/09/2025

New Borders of My Body @ Open Eye Gallery's Outside Walls | 26 September – 16 November

New Borders of My Body by Elena Subach traces a metamorphosis that begins in trauma – the loss of limbs through war – and continues in water, the primordial environment of healing and transformation.

Launch: 25 September, 6pm

Read more: https://openeye.org.uk/whatson/new-borders-of-my-body-outside-walls/

The photographs show people with amputations during aquatic rehabilitation. Their bodies, partly obscured and abstracted, hover in a threshold space where pain, memory, and presence coexist.

Water becomes both the maternal womb and mirror, dissolving outlines and shaping new borders.

Yet this metamorphosis is also collective. Just as the body grieves its lost parts, the country bears its own amputation – territories of Ukraine remain occupied. Still, we keep moving, finding ways to live with pain, to stand, to speak. The body becomes a site of resistance, resilience, and quiet transformation.

Rather than individual portraits, the images waver between abstraction and recognisability, pointing towards a shared vulnerability. They speak not only of the wounds carved into flesh by war, but also of the fragility and permeability of every body – personal and political – and of the urgent need for new forms of integration, for attempts to become whole within the unhealed.

19/09/2025

Last weekend to submit your photos to our free open call!

https://openeye.org.uk/open-call-for-the-liverpool-city-region-photo-awards-2025/

18/09/2025

I’ll Tell You Later exhibition is extended until 1 November!

This exhibition at Williamson Art Gallery and Museum explores the relationship between the Deaf experience and the hearing world. It is showcasing the work of the BSL Happy Snappers, a Wirral-based photography group made up of both Deaf and BSL users.

The title captures something many d/Deaf people hear too often – a phrase that shuts them out of conversations, decisions, or jokes. Through this exhibition, the BSL Happy Snappers turn that experience on its head, inviting you to pause, look closely, and really engage.

Here's a quote from a reflection on the exhibition by photographer Pete Carr:

The exhibition launch was interesting. After the speeches, there was a 10-minute period of silence. Communication was only possible through non-verbal means. The aim of the 10-minute silence, I imagine, as I ironically couldn’t hear the instructions, was to flip the world. Deaf was normal and speech was the minority. All those who relied on speech got to experience what it must be like to walk a few steps in someone else’s shoes. Now all the D/deaf people who could sign/lip read were happily chatting away, and the people who relied on speech were stuck. I could only manage signing “Close your rings” and “Thank you” due to Apple Fitness. Not very useful, but it shows the power of putting these ideas in front of people who never feel the need to engage with them.

Full article: https://openeye.org.uk/i-am-deaf-a-photographers-reflection/

Images: exhibition launch by Alex Sheen

17/09/2025

Catch our creative producer Declan Connolly on BBC Merseyside talking about our current open call for the Liverpool City Region Photo Awards!

Who can submit? What kind of photos are we looking for? What do the winners get? All answers from 1.35.40: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002j3n7

Submit your work for our open call: https://openeye.org.uk/open-call-for-the-liverpool-city-region-photo-awards-2025/

14/09/2025

More about the exhibition: https://openeye.org.uk/whatson/unsung-heroes-celebrating-liverpools-grassroots-boxing/

14/09/2025

Show us your work!

Deadline extended for the Liverpool City Region Photo Awards.

Categories

🧡 Celebration

Something we celebrate is something we’re publicly proud of – is there something not enough people celebrate? What do you want to tell absolutely everybody about?

🧡 Connecting

We connect to people, places, animals, plants and objects everyday, some more meaningful than others. How do you feel about these connections and how would you show them?

🧡 Futures

We all experience our climate and think about the future of our planet. What around you do you see as a positive? What would you like to keep for the future, and what would you like to change?

🧡 Shared space(s)

Where we choose to spend our time reveals a lot about a person and when shared, it can begin to represent the ideals or wants of a community. Your town, cafés, your friend’s house, your favourite bench – every place holds hundreds of stories. Which stories will you choose?

🧡 Movement

Running clubs, dancing, travelling or the passing of time. Think creatively – what moves you?

🧡 Care

Care and caring looks different to each person. We can care for our friends, we can care for our communities, we can care for our environment. We can feel cared for. What does care look like for you?

Entry is free and open to anyone living in the city region (Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens, Wirral).

The competition is delivered by Open Eye Gallery with the support of Liverpool City Region Combined Authority.

12/09/2025

Coming soon: Next Up, our annual graduate exhibition of work from the MA in Socially Engaged Photography course, a joint programme Open Eye Gallery has run with the University of Salford since 2018.

This year, we feature work by three early-career photographers and creative producers from our 2024 graduates (in our upstairs Gallery 3 space), from 26 September – 16 November.

Isabel Walker focuses on social connections found through subcultures in the electronic music industry.

Eleni Karypidou showcases her project, Breaking the Silence; a participatory art project with women from HMP Styal, exploring ideas of freedom of expression through music and dance.

Anna Wijnhoven presents Embracing the Inevitable, an ongoing collaborative photography project which navigates the real lived experiences of six assisted death advocates.

More about the projects: https://openeye.org.uk/whatson/next-up-2025/

Images by Isabel Walker