Finding Pictures
For more than fifty years I have been finding pictures. This is where you can find them.
Sometimes I find pictures in familiar landscapes—the edge of the ocean, a changing sky, a tree standing in water. At other times they appear in places passed almost unnoticed. What connects them is not geography or subject, but a moment when light, movement, weather and form briefly come together.
I am drawn to the point at which the familiar begins to change. Water becomes mist, clouds become form, darkness isolates a tree, and the passage of time transforms the ordinary into something less certain.
Some photographs are made in an instant. Others require minutes of exposure and waiting. Both begin with the same thing: recognising a picture before it disappears.
The photographs gathered here span landscape, coast, abstraction and the human figure. I don't see these as separate ways of working. They are part of the same continuing process of looking.
Finding pictures is simply what I do.
About Paul
Paul Foley is an Australian fine-art photographer based in Newcastle. He has been making photographs for more than fifty years, beginning at sixteen when he bought his first camera to photograph his friends surfing.
After a 35-year career in commercial photography, his work now follows a much simpler premise: finding pictures. Light, shadow, time, place and memory recur across photographs ranging from the Australian coast and landscape to abstraction and the human figure.
His work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally. He was a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2011 and the Galah Regional Photography Prize in 2025, and has been selected for several Mosman 2088 exhibitions.
The photographs are made as limited-edition archival pigment prints on cotton rag paper. Each print is accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity.