An Atelier Saint-Michel project in collaboration with Bad Saturn.
“So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.”
— E.B. White, Here Is New York
Soft Map of NYC is an open call for artists living or working in New York City to take part in a citywide art project exploring tenderness, place, and embodied memory. The project invites photographers, filmmakers, writers, and interdisciplinary artists to create Polaroid-based works that trace where feeling lives in the city, moments of care, ache, and attention that often go unnoticed but define how we belong.
The project utilizes Polaroid cameras and instant film to create tactile, time-sensitive records of tenderness across the five boroughs. A selection of photographs from each artist will be released for sale on a split commission, while others will be featured in a 2027 exhibition and an artist book (project outcome and funding dependent).
Rather than documenting landscape, Soft Map of NYC gathers images of sensation and an affective cartography of intimacy, stillness, and connection. It extends the methodology of Michèle Saint-Michel’s A Map of All My Tender Places (forthcoming, Bloomsbury 2026), which approaches photography as both relic and ritual, capable of carrying emotion in its imperfections. The project asks artists to feel rather than navigate, to hold rather than resolve, and to treat image-making as an aperture into embodied experience.
While many lens-based artists are expected to apply, participation is open to all practices that engage tenderness as method and attention as a form of care, including performance, sound, and text-based work.
Submissions open Friday, November 14, 2025, and close Thursday, January 1, 2026.
Open to artists living or working in any of New York City’s five boroughs.
Submission Fee: $15 to support materials, scanning, production, and admin.
To Apply: Submit your name, borough, neighborhood, short bio, link to work, and a 150-word reflection on where tenderness lives for you in the city.
Artists retain full copyright. By participating, they grant non-exclusive rights for exhibition, publication, and promotional use with credit.
A Soft Map of NYC is curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, film curator and artist whose work explores tenderness as method, somatic memory, and the quiet intensities of the everyday.
For inquiries, email michelesaintmichel@gmail.com.