The camera is a passport into people’s lives - and into people's homes sometimes.
The Alec Gill and Giroscope International Photography Competition opens on 9 July 2026, inviting photographers from Hull, the UK and across the world to respond to its first-year theme: HOME.
Home can mean bricks, streets, rooms and roofs. It can also mean memory, family, routine, refuge, culture, belonging, displacement, loss, return, or the slow work of rebuilding. It might be the place you come from, the place you are trying to hold onto, or the place you are still searching for. Giroscope’s work has never been just about buildings. It is about creating secure homes, backing people, and making places where communities can take root. This competition grows from the same ground.
The competition takes its name from Alec Gill, whose photography documented communities living through industrial decline, housing change and social transformation. His images paid attention to ordinary life without reducing it. They present humour, strain, pride, uncertainty, tenderness and resilience in the same frame. They showed that places are not just made of buildings, but of people, relationships, work, memory and survival. Find out more about Alec Gill’s work in his book, The Alec Gill Hessle Road photo archive
The Alec Gill and Giroscope International Photography Competition asks photographers to look closely and honestly at the world around them. We are interested in images that carry a story. Images that notice what is often walked past. Images that understand that home is both deeply personal and shaped by forces bigger than any one household.
At its heart, the competition is about visibility: who gets seen, what gets remembered, and what can be learned by paying closer attention to everyday life.
Although Giroscope is based in West Hull, the competition is open to photographers anywhere in the world. Entrants are invited to respond to the theme of HOME through the people, places and stories around them.
The competition
- Submissions are open from 9th July, and the closing date for entries is 30 October 2026.
- Shortlisted and winning work will be shown in a public exhibition at St Matthew’s Community Enterprise Centre, Hull, in March 2027, as part of Giroscope’s 40th anniversary programme.
- The competition is open to amateur and professional photographers, with two categories. Adult category (18+), entry fee £5 for up to two submissions with a prize of £500. Young people’s category (17 and under), entry fee £2 for up to two submissions with a £300 photography equipment award.
- Work may be documentary, portrait, street, landscape or conceptual. What matters is that it connects meaningfully with the theme and treats people, place and experience with care.
- Entries will be judged on authenticity, storytelling, creativity and technical quality.
- Photographs must be original works, with only basic editing permitted. Generative AI imagery will not be accepted.
- Entrants will retain copyright of their work, while granting Giroscope permission to use selected images in exhibition and promotional materials with full credit.
- The public exhibition at St Matthew’s Community Enterprise Centre will bring the shortlisted and winning images into a building that carries its own story of change. Once a parish church, St Matthew’s is now a ‘home’ for enterprise, community activity and people trying things out.
Details of how to enter the competition will be shared on 9th July 2026 when the competition opens.
Photograph at the top – Patience Scott, Airlie Street: Alec Gill
