From 13,500 submissions to 50 billboards: inside VSCO’s ambitious photo project

Curating a call for work is always a daunting task. In the case of VSCO’s recent The Fifty call, that involved sorting through roughly 13,500 submissions, with the need to narrow it down to just 50 photographs, one for a billboard in every U.S. state. Making things even more challenging was the breadth of work. Submissions covered every genre you could think of, from wildlife and street photography to weddings and fine art, with photographers from every career stage, too. And, on top of all that, the images also needed to look good at billboard scale. 

For Jon Feinstein, VSCO’s lead curator, the project was about more than picking great pictures. “It’s not just the work, but it’s the careers and passions and commitment to photography by these photographers, and that’s what’s so important,” he said. I recently sat down with Feinstein and Niamh Hughes, VSCO’s director of communications, who walked me through how he and the team made these decisions and how the project came to be. 

Where The Fifty came from 

VSCO

At its core, The Fifty is about getting photographers’ work off phone screens and into the real world, in front of people in their own communities. The idea was built on a couple of projects VSCO previously ran online. At the end of 2025, the company published the VSCO 100, a collection of 100 images from its global community. Then, in July, it followed up with a set of photos celebrating America. Both resonated enough that the marketing team started asking what the same idea might look like at a much bigger scale.

There was another motivation, too. Earlier this year, CEO Eric Wittman wrote a letter to photographers about AI and how much they matter, and the team kept returning to it. “It was a lovely note, but we kept coming back to it,“ said Hughes. “We’re talking about championing photographers, but what does that actually mean, and how can we show that beyond products?” Another factor was that a VSCO survey about how photographers use AI had turned up a recurring complaint: how hard it is to market themselves when they’re at the mercy of algorithm-driven platforms.

So at a marketing off-site, head of marketing Megan Kirkpatrick suggested 50 billboards in 50 states. From there, things quickly moved forward. The project went from idea to launch in roughly two months, with the call for work coming in August. The first billboards went up in October, and more are rolling out in waves through the fall and into the new year.

Casting a wide net

The team kept an eye on where submissions were coming from to ensure they had representation for each state. VSCO

When VSCO launched The Fifty, the goal was to make it easy to enter. For about a month, photographers could post up to five images to VSCO with two hashtags: #thefifty and the state they live in or are from. Entry was free, and all you needed was a VSCO account and to be based in the U.S. 

During the submission process, the team was paying close attention to which states were getting the most entries. Feinstein told me that he would pop in to review images before the selection process started, with the goal of making sure they were getting enough submissions from lower-population states compared to states like New York, California or Illinois. They also made sure they were advertising the call for work in as many places as possible. “There are hundreds of photo clubs in the country, and we spent a lot of time reaching out to photo clubs and Facebook groups and things like that,” said Hughes. 

This photograph by Constance Jaeggi O’Connor was selected to represent Colorado. Constance Jaeggi O’Connor

To aid in reviewing work, VSCO head of data Josh Attenberg, built a platform where they could organize and see images per state. Then, when it came time to narrow down images, the process started with Rouse. “She would pull images that fit this broad umbrella parameter: could we see it on a billboard?” said Feinstein. “It wasn’t: is this absolutely amazing, but is it good, objectively? Is it impactful? Would it stop somebody if they saw it on the street? Does it hint at a larger story, or does it tell a story in a single photo?” 

Another part of the selection process focused on diversity across genres. “We really wanted to break from specific genres and niches, because our photographers are art photographers, they’re brand photographers, they’re wedding photographers,” Feinstein told me. “How do you blend all these different approaches and genres? It’s a ridiculously ambitious task and problem that drove so many of our conversations, our selection process.” That meant looking past whether a photo was simply good, and thinking about how it fit into the larger story.

A behind-the-scenes glimpse of The Fifty project. VSCO

When the submission window closed, the real work began. “Right when we hit the deadline, we had our first few states. I think Georgia, Illinois, Washington and New York were the first four, so we buckled down,” said Feinstein. “After Christina [Rouse] did her initial vetting, I went in and made my recommendations, and then we met as an executive team to talk about where this fits into VSCO’s larger mission, the diversity culturally, niche, genre-wise, career stage.”

While going state by state made the process more manageable, it was still far from easy. Feinstein explained that any open call, especially one that involves a larger team reviewing submissions, can be a challenge. That was even more true here, given where the work would end up. “We all come from different perspectives, and part of it has been about all of us being able to step aside from our personal tastes and think about, okay, what makes sense on a billboard?” Feinstein told me. “What just won’t work? Maybe the color palette is just too dark, and it won’t be felt on a billboard.”

The selection process often went beyond the single photo that was submitted, too. In some cases, Feinstein said, a single photograph made enough of an impact that they made the decision on that alone. Other times, the team would dig deeper. “We’d look at what else had been posted on VSCO, we’d look at the story behind the project or behind the image, we’d look at their websites,” he said. “For me, it’s important to go a little bit further, to know the work, know what’s behind it, and sometimes those pieces would be final-round decision makers.”

The curator behind the call

Feinstein came to VSCO with a foot in both the art and commercial worlds, and that background has a direct impact on how he thinks about curation. He studied photography at Bard College with Stephen Shore and Larry Fink, among others, in a program he said “really shaped how I thought about photography and image making in the context of the larger world.” He later worked in marketing and curation at Shutterstock while also cofounding Humble Arts, which showed emerging photographers alongside established names like Alec Soth.

That mix is what brought him to VSCO. A little over a year ago, Kirkpatrick, a former Shutterstock colleague, messaged him about a curator role. It was a full-time job combining marketing, tech and curation. “I was like, this is a dream job opportunity,” he said.

What a curator does, Feinstein said, “differs depending on where you are.” At VSCO, curation takes many forms. Fellow curator Christina Rouse selects images to feature in the app, and the team also curates monthly In Focus features for VSCO’s Journal. When VSCO needs images for its own marketing, it often licenses them from community photographers instead of buying stock, paying them “as if we were licensing independently.” 

What connects all of it, Feinstein said, is thinking about outcomes. His time at Shutterstock was largely focused on metrics and performance, and some of that has carried over to his mindset at VSCO, too. “It’s not just about telling amazing stories or about showing amazing work. It’s not just about what myself or other curators want to showcase,” he explained. “But it’s what impact will that have on photographers’ careers? What impact will it have in this crazy period of photography, where we’re so terrified of AI, and there’s a very dim picture being painted? How can we combat that, and how can we really make sure that real photography is prioritized?”

What the submissions showed

Nat Segebre’s “After Hours At The Fair” was selected to represent Florida. Nat Segebre

Given the breadth of entries in this open call, I was curious whether Feinstein had noticed any trends that might indicate the state of photography. “The first is the prominence of film,” Feinstein said, adding that photographers who came to film after digital “have adopted it in a serious, professional manner.”

“I think a lot of us think about a younger generation embracing film for nostalgic reasons, and they got into it for those reasons, but they’re actually using it for serious projects, for serious work, not just to have a film camera around their neck,” Feinstein told me. “They have a job, a campaign, and they’re like, I’ll do this if I can shoot film, because of the authentic feel, the realness. I thought there would be dominance in film, but not at the scale that I was seeing, and it’s refreshing when it’s taken so seriously.”

He also saw genres bleeding into each other. Feinstein explained that he saw a lot of photographers “taking a documentary lens to brand work, to commercial clients, to wedding photography, to areas that didn’t traditionally champion that in the same way.” He also noticed that personal projects were blending into brand work. “So many photographers who are largely doing campaign work are submitting personal projects where, if you looked at the personal project and then you looked at work they’ve done for Nike or someone like that, you see a connection, an aesthetic connection, and a gut, soul connection to it as well.”

Lastly, Feinstein said that reviewing work for The Fifty made him rethink his views on clichés. “Years ago, especially when you come out of art school, there are these ideas of what a cliché is, and it’s this reductive way of looking at common themes,” he told me. “But in looking at a lot of the work in The Fifty, and a lot of work on VSCO, they’re not necessarily clichés, they’re universalities.”

“They’re ways of people having shared a vision and putting their own way of seeing into it, even though they might be photographing the same thing,” Feinstein continued. “Just because a million people have photographed birds, or a million people have photographed the Statue of Liberty, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done interestingly, because a photographer has a true vision, a true way of seeing, true intentionality.”

For Feinstein, this New York selection is the image that best sums up The Fifty. Joana Meurkens

He pointed to an image of the Statue of Liberty that was submitted (and selected) as an example. “If you went back a year or two ago and said, ‘Would you curate an image of the Statue of Liberty in an open call?’ I’d be like, no,” he told me. 

Feinstein went on to explain the story of the photograph, and how photographer Joana Meurkens noticed her friend’s arm perfectly framing the Statue of Liberty while on a ferry. “So she has this image where he’s blurry in the foreground, the statue is perfectly framed, and it tells this story of immigration, of distance and opportunity, that goes beyond what you expect from a photo of the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “There’s this personal connection. It’s not just a street photo. It made me think about photography differently.”

It’s the image Feinstein keeps coming back to. “I think it speaks to this common thread of seeing something in a new way,” he told me. “One of the biggest words that I’ve seen come up since I’ve been at VSCO is intentionality. That ability to show your unique way of seeing and your unique perspective and craft in one place, whether it’s photographing new subject matter that hasn’t been tackled before or photographing the Statue of Liberty, I think that image sums that up pretty heavily.” Out of 13,500 submissions, it’s a fitting reminder that what makes the cut isn’t always a new subject, but a new way of seeing one.