The inaugural LAH Photography Awards recognize excellence and artistry in photography and support the accomplishments of our LAH students.

Eligibility: Current Liberal Arts Honors Students

Specifications: Submit an original photograph taken during the past academic year (1 September 2025 – 1 September 2026)

Award Brief: “Small World”

While travel photography often seeks the grand and the distant, our “Small World” brief challenges you to shrink the map. We are not looking for the sprawling of horizons or famous landmarks that define a destination; instead, we invite you to document the intimate, often overlooked moments that prove the world is much smaller than it appears.

What We Are Looking For: We want to see the “spirit of adventure” captured through a narrower lens. Your submission should explore common threads that bind us across borders, cultures, and environments. Whether you are shooting in a bustling city or a remote village, your work should highlight:

• The Miniature Detail: Textures, patterns, or objects that are unique to a place but universal in their beauty.
• Shared Human Gestures: Candid moments of connection, camaraderies, or daily ritual that make a foreign land feel intimate.
• Narrative Scale: Innovative uses of perspective that play with scale, making the vast feel intimate or the ordinary feel monumental.

Creative Freedom: Participants are encouraged to interpret this them from any angle —be it street, portraiture, or documentary. Images can be shot on any device (including a phone) and in any style. We are searching for work that triggers memory and expands our collective horizons, whether during a study abroad experience, in Austin, or your hometown.

Awards: We anticipate making three awards of $1000 each. Additionally, we will print and frame each of the award-winning photographs and display them in the LAH Suite.

Submissions: Your context submission are due by 12 pm CDT on September 1, 2026. Submit your digital file (jpeg, tiff or raw) via the UT Box link below. Please be sure to include your name and EID in the title of the file and at the top of your work.

Submission Link: HERE