SDN's Tenth Anniversary party at Bronx Documentary Center, October 2018. Photo by Matthew Lomanno.
We encourage both professional and non-professional photographers to submit your work to the Social Documentary Network website. The primary criteria is your commitment to use the documentary form to explore the human condition—with the goal of increasing our understanding of it. Submitting your projects to the SDN website is the first and only step in getting your work selected for publication in ZEKE magazine.
After filling out a simple form for a free membership, you will immediately be able to create and submit exhibits.
Once you become a member, you will receive our monthly Spotlight e-newsletters featuring the best work submitted during the previous month (maybe yours!), other news from SDN about exhibitions, competitions, and other programs, and news about the field of documentary photography.
Click here for to sign up for a free membership.
Click here to login to your account with your username and password. Then click on tab to create a new exhibit.
To create and edit exhibits, you will need to use Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Internet Explorer is not currently supported.
Image and text requirements
We will respond to your submission within 1-3 business days (usually on the shorter side). Our goal is to approve your exhibit. Greater than 90% of all exhibits submitted to SDN are eventually approved. The most common reason for not being approved is that we feel the exhibit is out of bounds of documentary, although we define documentary very broadly.
All new exhibits submitted to SDN are now free for one year. After one year, standard rates for renewals will apply. Submissions to Call for Entries will still require a fee.
After creating your exhibit, you can edit your exhibit photos and text at any time. You can choose to hide or show individual images, change the order of photos, or temporarily hide your entire exhibit or delete your exhibit. You can also add additional information in other fields such as photographers statement, bio, and other credits. You can insert code from YouTube or Vimeo to play video directly in your exhibit. You can add new photos although you may need to pay for additional images.
All photographers have an option to create a personal profile page on SDN. See this example by photographer Frank Ward. You can create your profile by clicking on the Profile tab in your account. You can also add social media links to appear on all your exhibits and on your profile page. Social media links are added when you create your profile page.
Photographers and documentarians (users) retain copyright of all material entered into site. Social Documentary Network (SDN) reserves the right to use any images entered into website for promotion of SDN and the website.
If you are already a member, you can skip this step and go directly to the login page.
