Open Call — Field Contributors
We're building local newsrooms
Small regional teams of photographers, writers, designers, and researchers — and we are looking for the people to build them with us.
A decade of community-first storytelling
Media used to be made by teams. A photographer, a writer, an editor, a designer, a researcher — all in the same room, arguing about how to get it right. That kind of collaborative, multidisciplinary newsroom has been hollowed out almost everywhere.
We want to bring it back — rebuilt around community and care rather than speed and profit, rooted in the places where the stories actually live.
Since 2015, femLENS has been teaching documentary photography to women and girls across Ireland, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine, Cameroon, Estonia, Poland, Spain, Germany, Mexico and beyond. We publish We See Magazine, produce zines, run workshops, and create exhibitions.
We believe the women closest to a story are the ones who should tell it. And we don’t think those stories are best told alone.
Countries
Issues of We See Magazine
No application deadline
The role
What a Field Contributor does
Photography
Writing
Design
Research
This is not content creation in the commercial sense. It is visual journalism with a political conscience.
As a femLENS Field Contributor, you create and contribute documentary storytelling — work grounded in your community and connected to the issues that shape our societies globally.
Depending on what you bring, that might mean photographing a women’s collective, researching the background behind the story, writing the words that carry the images, and designing the zine or self-published book it becomes.
You might document a housing protest, a community kitchen, a factory floor, or one woman’s ordinary week. Whatever the medium, the approach stays the same: slow, ethical, community-first.
“We’ve done a version of this before. What came out of those calls was meaningful and creative, and often the kind of work that rarely gets commissioned in the mainstream.”
What we're looking for
01
A genuine feminist politics
Not as an aesthetic, but as a lens on how power, labour, land, and bodies are organised.
02
An anticolonial understanding
Of whose stories get told, and how, and for whom.
03
Ethical storytelling
You work with people, not at them. Accountability to the people in front of the lens.
04
Local to global
An instinct to connect what is local and specific to what is structural and global.
05
Documentary interest
Through photography, writing, design, or research — at any level of technical experience.
The craft, we grow together
femLENS works collaboratively. You will have access to our community of photographers, writers, designers, researchers, and editors. If your images are strong but your editing is not, we help. If your writing is sharp but your captions need work, we help.
Technical skills are learnable, and we have been building ways to share them across our community for ten years.
“The women closest to a story are the ones who should tell it.”
How to apply
Tell us where you are and what you bring. We are matching people into regional teams, so location matters this time.
If a form isn’t accessible to you, write to us at info[@]femlens.com with the subject line Field Contributor Open Call.
Where you’re based — so we can connect you with others nearby
What you bring — photography, writing, design, research, or a mix
A short introduction — who you are and why this call speaks to you (no more than 300 words)
A link to your work, or a small sample — 5 to 10 images, a few pages of writing, a design or a research example. Phone photography is welcome.
One story from your community that you think deserves to be seen
Join us
You would be joining at the founding moment.
femLENS is a feminist non-profit association. We particularly welcome applications from women and girls in communities that are rarely centred in international media.