If your audience is standing indefinitely motionless, entranced by the possibilities in your work and in devising an infinitude of scenarios and alternate endings, then you've made an image that will inspire gallery visitors with the beauty of ambiguity, mystery and perplexity.

Photographers created images that baffled the viewer as early at the 1860s; Henry Peach Robinson was a pioneer of combination printing, creating the illusory photo montage long before there was Photoshop. We want to see your images that lead the imagination to the edge, encouraging the mind to leap. Multiple exposures, constructions, staged, anything goes, just leave us guessing.

Juror:http://www.edelmangallery.com"> Catherine Edelman

Opening in Chicago in 1987, the Catherine Edelman Gallery was quick to become one of the Midwest's leading fine art photography galleries.  Director and Owner Catherine Edelman has "a patient eye for artists, tracking their progress [and] representing mature photographers who deliver consistent, quality work, regardless of age or exposure."  Edelman has upheld her original promise to feature prominent Contemporary photographers alongside new and emerging talent, supplying her audience with a refreshing breadth of both subject matter and photographic technique.

CEG debuted with Nan Goldin and the "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" progressing through everything from street photography (Susan Meiselas, Sebastiao Salgado, James Nachtwey) to fashion photography (Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston) to traditional landscape images (Michael Kenna, Lynn Geesaman) and also socially-conscious work (Richard Misrach, Jeffrey Wolin, Terry Evans, Allen Ginsberg) and narrative (Joel-Peter Witkin, Elizabeth Ernst, Dan Estabrook).

Working closely with magazine editors and book publishers, the Catherine Edelman Gallery co-published several monographs and collections, including: Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, photographs by Jeffrey Wolin (Chronicle Books), Pressure, photographs by Joe Ziolkowski (Pohlmann Press), What Were You Thinking (celebrating the 15 year anniversary of the gallery in association with Paper Mirror Press) and Iron Beauties, a monograph on the work of Chicago photographer Michelle Keim, published by Nazraeli Press.

Catherine Edelman is an executive board member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers and President of the Chicago Art Dealers Association.   In addition to hosting Saturday Morning educational seminars for her community, Edelman recently opened an online gallery of underrepresented local artists, titled "The Chicago Project."

We are so pleased to offer the seasoned curatorial eye of Catherine Edelman for "Secrets and Mysteries."