The Golden Hour

Photographers have chased it for as long as there have been cameras. It's the short stretch after sunrise or before sunset when the light drops low and turns warm, shadows get long, and ordinary things look briefly important.

THE GOLDEN HOUR asks what that light does to a photograph, and what a photograph does with it. Sometimes it's the obvious thing: a street turned to copper, a face lit from the side, a field burning amber for ten minutes before it goes gray. It can also be quieter. The last light on a kitchen wall, a room you know well looking strange for a moment, something you nearly missed because the light was already going.

We're also open to looser readings. A golden hour can be a peak moment, a short window of grace, a time you didn't know mattered until it was over. If your photograph is about that fleeting quality, about something luminous that won't last, it belongs here.

All genres and processes are welcome: landscape, street, portrait, still life, documentary, constructed, abstract, film, digital, and alternative process. Color or black and white. We're less interested in the most dramatic sunset than in the image that makes us feel the time of day.

THE GOLDEN HOUR is a Flash call: a fee-free thematic exhibition, curated internally and not a competition. There are no awards and no rankings. Selected photographs are presented together as an online exhibition at Decagon Gallery.