About Paul Foley

Paul Foley is an Australian fine-art photographer based in Newcastle, New South Wales.

He has been making photographs for more than fifty years, including a 35-year career as a professional commercial photographer. His personal work ranges across landscape, the sea, abstraction and the human form, connected by a continuing interest in light, shadow, time, place and memory.

His photographs have been recognised in Australian and international photography awards and exhibited in Australia and overseas.

Finding Pictures

I have been making photographs since I was sixteen.

I think of much of what I do simply as finding pictures. I look for relationships between light and shadow, lines and shapes, landscape and humanity. Sometimes the picture is found in a broad landscape; sometimes in water, a body, a fragment of architecture or an unexpected meeting of things.

The subject matters, but it isn't always the reason for making the photograph.

I am interested in what happens when a place, a moment or a familiar object becomes something else within the frame. Light can reveal it, simplify it or make it briefly strange. Memory also has a way of entering photographs, particularly in places I have known for a long time.

I still regard myself as a generalist photographer. Some ideas become collections that I return to over many years. Others arrive unexpectedly and may result in only one photograph.

A Life in Photography

My first attraction to photography came through the surf magazines of the 1970s. I saved for a Pentax SLR and a cheap 400mm lens and began photographing friends surfing.

After waiting for the Kodachromes to return from processing, I would project the best pictures onto my bedroom wall and imagine them as magazine pages and covers.

There was some publishing success during the 1970s and 80s, but travelling to surf locations also began changing the way I thought about photography. I became interested not only in the subject in front of the camera, but in how a photograph was constructed.

I discovered the photographs and writing of Ansel Adams, attended workshops with established photographers and was fortunate to receive mentoring from the Australian photographer David Moore. For many years I worked predominantly with medium- and large-format cameras, where making a photograph required a particular kind of patience and precision.

Photography eventually became my profession. Based in Newcastle, I spent 35 years working as a commercial photographer for local, national and international clients, with assignments throughout Australia and overseas.

All the while, I continued making photographs for myself.

Since leaving commercial photography, that personal work has become my focus. There are no briefs or corporate mood boards now. I can follow a picture because I am curious about it and see where it leads.

Light, Time and Place

Light has always been central to the way I see.

Sometimes it describes a subject precisely. At other times I use long exposures, movement, monochrome or abstraction to move the photograph away from a straightforward description of what was there.

The coast around Newcastle is an important part of this work. The sea, ocean pools, rock platforms, beaches and changing coastal weather provide subjects I can return to without expecting to make the same photograph twice.

But the work extends well beyond landscape. I am equally interested in people, the human form, cities, small observations and the accidental arrangements that appear when I am paying attention.

Colour, black and white or a more abstract treatment are decisions made in response to the individual picture rather than a predetermined style.

The Photograph as a Print

I have always believed that the physical print matters.

We now see extraordinary numbers of photographs on screens, often for only a few seconds. A print asks for a different kind of attention.

For me, making the print is not simply reproduction. It is the final stage of making the photograph—working with tone, colour, scale, surface and detail until the picture feels resolved.

My limited-edition works are produced as archival fine-art pigment prints on cotton rag paper and supplied with a signed Certificate of Authenticity.

A photograph on a wall has a life very different from one on a screen. It becomes something you can return to.

Exhibitions and Recognition

My photographs have been shown in individual, collaborative and group exhibitions in Newcastle, Sydney and Mosman, as well as internationally in Glasgow, Tokyo and China.

Recognition has included selection as a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2011 and the Galah Regional Photography Prize in 2025, together with other photographic awards and selections.

I continue to make photographs because I continue to find them.

After more than fifty years, the pleasure is still in looking.