OVERVIEW

The Field of Vision series is rooted in Central Illinois. For the 2026 iteration, In Plain Sight, we invite photographers working in Central Illinois and across the Midwest to consider the region as a shared visual condition—linked by geography, time, labor, and everyday experience rather than by borders or identity alone.

The Midwest is often defined by state boundaries or census regions, but those lines rarely describe how space is actually lived, shaped, or seen. For this exhibition, the region is approached as a set of overlapping spatial conditions formed by land use, settlement, industry, ecology, and movement. These conditions frequently cut across political borders and coexist within the same places. Central Illinois remains a point of reference within a broader landscape shaped by agriculture, river systems, infrastructure, and seasonal rhythms.

The Midwest, in this sense, is not a fixed outline on a map but a layered environment where different histories and ways of occupying land intersect, persist, and sometimes conflict. In Plain Sight is interested in photographic work that attends to what is often overlooked or taken for granted—ordinary places, everyday routines, familiar landscapes, and quiet traces of the past embedded in the present.

Submissions may engage with space in many ways, including but not limited to ancestral, settler, vernacular, transitional, residual, agrarian, domestic, peripheral, represented, or lived spaces across Central Illinois and the Midwest. Work may be documentary, poetic, experimental, or process-based. The exhibition does not privilege any single photographic approach; emphasis is placed on clarity of vision, attentiveness to place, and how images work together as a sequence or project.

Photographers at all stages of practice are welcome to submit. Selected works will be presented as part of the Field of Vision exhibition series and may be included in related publications or programming.