Central Australia began on the road…

Written By Paul Foley

In July 2025 I travelled north through the interior of South Australia towards Uluru and Kata Tjuta. The distance became part of the photography.

Long stretches of highway, roadside trees, salt lakes, warning signs and eroded desert formations gradually gave way to some of the most recognisable landscapes in Australia.

The monumental places are here, but I became equally interested in what happened between them.

A road disappearing towards the horizon. A solitary tree beside the Stuart Highway. The strange geological forms of Kanku-Breakaways. The white surface of Lake Hart. And eventually Uluru and Kata Tjuta, changing continually as winter light moved across their surfaces.

Some photographs describe the immense scale of the landscape; others concentrate on a fragment, a tree, a sign or the texture of stone. Together they are less a record of destinations than of looking while travelling through a vast country.

The places were already there. I simply had to notice where to stop.

Paul Foley

I am an Australian fine-art photographer based in Newcastle, New South Wales, and have been making photographs for more than fifty years, including 35 years as a professional commercial photographer.

I think of much of my personal work simply as finding pictures—looking for relationships between light and shadow, lines and shapes, landscape and humanity. My photographs range across landscape, the sea, abstraction and the human form, with recurring interests in time, place and memory.

I remain a generalist photographer. Some ideas develop into collections that I return to over many years; others appear unexpectedly and result in a single photograph.

My work has been recognised in Australian and international photography awards and exhibited in Australia and overseas. Including as a finalist in the Galah Regional Photography Prize (2025) and National Photographic Portrait Prize (2011), selected to hang in several 'Mosman 2088' exhibitions and included in group exhibitions in Glasgow, Tokyo, Newcastle and China. I have also had individual and collaborative exhibitions in Sydney and Newcastle.

I live in Newcastle, Australia.

https://www.paulfoley.com.au
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Tidal Script