Touching Grass in the Metaverse: Here are the Winners of Decentraland’s Photography Open Call for Art Week 2025

If you’ve ever wondered what it might mean to hang a photograph inside a world that isn’t bound by walls, gravity, or even the rules of perspective, Decentraland Art Week 2025 has an answer, and it’s pretty wild. This year’s festival, themed “TOUCH GRASS”, includes The Photography Gallery, an Escher-inspired 3D installation by Carlos Mu that turns the act of looking at a single image into a full-on immersive journey. Visitors will step through ten impossible doors, each leading to a room where a photograph is given space to breathe and be encountered on its own terms.

This makes it especially exciting for us because DIYP partnered with Decentraland to co-curate the show and help select the winners. In online spaces, still images often get flattened into wallpaper and just become background noise behind the action. Here, they’re anything but that. Pretty much anything is possible in the virtual world, and by bending architecture, light, and perspective, the gallery demands a presence normally reserved for a framed print in a physical museum. It’s a photography exhibition limited only by imagination. Here is our pick of our favourite images selected for the exhibition:

Decentraland Art Week 2025: Touching Grass

Photography Winners’ Gallery

Joshua Griffler (MAKE)

Sprites in the Woods

The image was taken in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for The Reverb Dance Festival. Dancers Scott Marlowe, Linda Steele, Jamielyn Duggan.

Rob Dawkings

Fake Plastic Tree

An artificial tree surrounded by modern architecture in London, England.

Cosme Andaluz

Untitled

This is a Double Exposure film photography on camera, (Nikon Fm) without postprocessing – from negative to scan.

Pablø Radice (rhizome)

Portrait of a root

Cannabis root (kánnavis)

Rachel Wood

Back Channels of Australia

I had the privilege in August, 2022 to roadtrip to the back channels of Australia for a rare flooding event. For the first time in over 100 years, the amount of rain in the desert caused extreme flooding, which changed the dry landscapes to be one of life and colors. Because of the unusual rainfall. we saw an abundant amount of wildlife and vibrant colors in the soil.

Many people, including Australians, do not typically traverse this far into the Outback, even when it’s dry. During this historic flooding, it is even more dangerous and not for the faint of heart traveler. Robert Downie and I were able to make the 40+ hour drive out and back with no major incident. We may be two out of a handful of people who have documented this rare natural phenomenon.

Abbas Rahmani

Fly

I took this photo in the winter of 2021 in Iran. That day the weather was minus 30 degrees and I had a cold. I saw this scene on my way back from the hospital and while I was very sick I stood in this cold for a few minutes so I could take photo. The extreme cold created this foggy and surreal atmosphere, and the flight of these birds added to the beauty of the effect, and I was lucky to arrive at this view at a good moment.

Ahmadreza Babae (Tarantula)

Fragments of Me

A moment where pieces of my soul meet in the silence of a mirror.

Ray Vagner (Sketchlight)

Stories

Light painting photography, created in real time captured in the camera in one single photographic frame.

Lazaro

Untitled

DmitryMax

Beauty in the grass

This is a portrait of Kate Astrid taken in Kyiv, 2023

Decentraland Art Week 2025 runs from September 24–27. You can explore the photography exhibition and other parts of the festival via the Decentraland Art Week website.

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