13 phenomenal photo artists

Fine art photography reshapes our perceptions and deepens our connection to the world around us. This genre goes beyond representation; it explores the intent and significance behind each image, placing photographs within a broader societal context. Through layers of hidden meanings and intentional motifs, fine art photographers weave narratives that encourage viewers to uncover subtle details and emotions.

These artists craft staged and surreal environments, each with their own unique vision. Their work evokes potent feelings and invites us to experience their individual creativity. In this blog, we celebrate some remarkable photographers whose unique visions have inspired us and left a lasting impact on the art community. Join us as we delve into their stories and discover the creativity and emotional depth that fine art photography has to offer. You might just find yourself inspired along the way!

The developer of the eponymous “Ballenesque” style, Roger Ballen is one of the key photographers of his generation. He describes this style as an aesthetic viewpoint into the human condition, mediated through his own eyes. This Ballenesque style draws on surrealism and a break with reality. Often featuring windowless walls and animalistic imagery, his subjects become carnival rats, trapped in a madhouse with no way out. There is a disturbing tension found within much of his work, a hazy veil of madness that descends over people, trapping, disconcerting, and dehumanising them. To Ballen, this visual language becomes a critical re-evaluation of the human condition. The grotesque mask of Roger the Rat becomes a metaphor for individuals trapped in desperate situations. The scratched, scribbled, and disturbed walls echo the screams of people pushing at the edges of a society that has thrown them to the curb. Darkly intriguing and at times deeply disturbing, Ballen’s work offers an important lens into the underbelly of our contemporary existence.

Want to know more? Check out this interview by Head On in 2021.

Bill Henson is the lightning rod of Australian photography. His first showcase, at the age of 19, emerged as photography began gaining recognition in Australia as an art form. He became the first photographer to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale and has gone on to inspire a subsequent generation of prominent Australian photographers. His use of chiaroscuro and sublime themes allowed for the creation of viscerally dark and engaging works of photography. In many ways, Henson’s work is almost painterly. The skin of his subjects is mottled, a complex overlay of marbled blues and saturated purples. Works made well into the 21st century take on the character of Caravaggio’s paintings or Michelangelo’s sculptures.

Henson’s world is dark and brooding, containing haunting storylines and fairytale figures. His subjects rise above the mundane, achieving a mythic brilliance that holds within it an enduring humanity. Crucial to Henson’s work is the tenderness within which his subjects reside. Their ethereal beauty and dark surrounds are offset by the compassion and longing held within their gazes. In “Untitled” (2000-2001), Henson’s subject soars above a dark cityscape. The grime of her dress and arms contrasts with the ethereal calmness of her poise and the delicate statuesque nature of her form. She is unwrapped before us, baring her soul to the world, flying like an angel through the night.

Samantha Everton’s worlds are imbued with a sense of childlike wonder, contrasted against a prism of nostalgia and yearning. Her work engages with the joy of childhood and the fun that comes with it. Colours are heightened, gravity is optional, and the rules of reality don’t seem to apply. In “Spring Passing” (2011), a figure is seen to be blown completely horizontal by the wind, while in “Narathorn” (2014), a young boy with wings tames a tiger.

However, there is an undercurrent of sadness and loss contained within these works. In “Bewitching Hour” (2009), just as one child gleefully flies away on a wooden flamingo, another stays firmly rooted to the ground, dreaming of take-off. This second child becomes a figure for the current audience, dreaming of breaking through a mundane barrier of existence but never achieving it. The girl, her face caught in meditative dreaming, embodies the yearning to recapture what was once had but is now lost. The imagination, the freedom from the world around us, is trapped behind a pane of glass that cannot be broken.

Samatha Everton was the winner of the 2005 Head On Portrait Prize, and her series Collected Works was part of the 2012 Head On Photo Festival. See more of her work here

A pioneering surrealist artist, Man Ray was one of the key figures in the development of fine art photography as we know it today. His photography played with formal style and perception, both within the works themselves and the society he produced them in. Drawn into the Dadaesque and the surreal, Ray sought to reject normative society by turning to dreams and the subconscious to create his works.

One of his key works, “Le Violon d’Ingres” (1924), exemplifies this approach. In it, Ray playfully reimagines the idea of a ‘waist,’ inserting the f-holes from a violin onto the waist of a female model. He transforms the woman from an actual figure into a dream-like state, a mythic being that couldn’t exist in the physical world. Additionally, he pokes fun at the ideas of fine art in French society. The title, meaning ‘a hobby,’ lends a sense of incredulity towards the status of the violin, the opera, and high-echelon pieces of music of the period.
The dreamlike state of his works helped formalise the visual language of fine art photography and was instrumental in the development of contemporary photographic practice.

Petrina Hicks explores convention, feminine identity, and narrative throughout her work. The Australian photographer captures individuals against block backgrounds, drawing them out of society and placing them in a liminal space where stillness is overpowering. However, her works often convey a narrative tension; the absence of any background offers the possibility of limitless worlds, with vast interacting folklore tales happening just out of view.
Hicks’ work often steps into the mythological. Her figures take on a smooth, statuesque quality that blurs the line between reality and myth. They become caricatures, figurines in a play happening just out of sight. In “Lambswool” (2008), a young girl is shown petting a wolf. The wolf is seen pulling at a lambswool jumper, a nod to its role as a hunter and predator. Yet, the girl appears to take on the form of Artemis, the maiden goddess of the hunt. She becomes the wolf-tamer, a deadly figure despite her appearance.

Further, the wolf also bears connections to Lupa, the she-wolf that raised Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Thus, the subject becomes a great warrior, capable of founding an empire. Hicks intentionally subverts the idea of the female form as small and defenceless, building up a mythic story around a figure who controls beasts and raises an empire.

Lambswool was exhibited as part of the Head On Photo Festival 2019.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has always been fascinated with the idea of time. Within his work, Sugimoto pushes the boundaries of human consciousness, examining how we interact with the world around us. To this end, photography is the ideal medium. Capturing a single moment, photographs hold contained and undamaged pasts, an exact record of events that even memory cannot fully grasp. In the eyes of Sugimoto, photographs are temporal anomalies. As memory breaks down, the past changes in the consciousness of those who remember it, and the world captured in Sugimoto’s photographs ceases to exist.

This is best exemplified in his series “Theatres.” In these works, Sugimoto would enter old, extravagant playhouses-cum-cinemas and take a single, long-exposure photograph of various movies. Though the result was a blank screen, captured within the work was an entire movie, compressed, overexposed, and reduced to blank space. In many ways, these spaces become metaphors for the memory that Sugimoto investigates. Grand, dilapidated, and empty, the images that were once so clear have faded into the distant past, along with the memories of time.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 27 October 2024. Find out more.

Gohar Dashti is a photographer deeply embedded in her cultural context. Her images engage with the suffering and trauma experienced during the Iran-Iraq war and its subsequent impact. Rather than documenting the suffering directly, her works take on an ethereal quality, creating staged landscapes and uncanny domestic scenes. Dashti’s series “Today’s Life and War” (2008) and “Iran Untitled” (2013) best evoke this.

The first series presents the domestic interior of Iranian civilians, showcasing couples getting married, celebrating birthdays, hanging out the washing, and more. However, this domesticity is juxtaposed with the setting of a war zone. The couple’s marriage car is a burnt-out wreck, and the washing line is made of barbed wire. In some images, soldiers run through the background, engaged in military operations. Yet, the civilians maintain completely composed expressions, calm and meditative in the face of extreme conflict.

For Dashti, this disjunction represents the crisis endured by Iranian civilians, thrown into a position of incredible peril against their will. With no way to escape, they are forced to continue living as normal, enduring extreme trauma behind closed doors. Her works offer a seminal commentary on the destructive nature of war and its impact on those most affected.

Banner image: Gohar Dashti, Untitled #5, (2008)

Though ostensibly, the goal of the camera is to document the world around us, it offers the ability to do much more. This is the edge on which Murray Fredericks’ work operates. Not content to capture the landscape, Fredericks creates ethereal and timeless images of the desolate Australian bush, evoking the sheer awe and isolation found in the outback. Fredericks regularly embarks on long solo adventures, staying up to five weeks in remote Australia without contact with anyone else.

His series “Blaze” engages with themes of isolation and beauty. Taking on an almost surreal aspect, Fredericks draws the drowned trees he photographs out of time. Carefully arranging fire strips along the branches of dead trees, he lights them for mere moments to ensure that nothing catches ablaze. The result is ethereal works where dead trees are aflame with life, lit by a fire that does not touch them. The trees appear caught in an instant of chrysalis, a glorious birth without yet suffering any damage.

Fredericks creates works separated from time—a lone piece of dead wood caught in the act of catching flame. In the violence and drama of the act, there is also deep serenity, a peace and calm that emerge from solitude in the face of danger. The tree is alive, the tree is burning, the tree is unharmed.

Murray Fredericks was awarded 2nd place in the 2015 Head On Landscape Awards. In 2022 Head On presented the premier of his film “Blaze”, documenting the process of his journey to create the photographic series. Find out more.

Moffatt’s work engages in a hyper-vivid storytelling of reality. In it, her figures become caricatures, dolls through which she can interrogate the violence and oppression towards minority groups by the Australian government. In particular, she draws on her own Indigenous heritage to highlight the abuse inflicted on Indigenous Australians by colonial invasion.

Tracey Moffatt rose to international acclaim with her work “Something More,” commissioned by the Murray Art Museum Albury in 1989. Its vivid, saturated colours became emblematic of the Australian Gothic style in which Moffatt works. Through nine panels, Moffatt depicts a young, mixed-race woman following her dream to go to the big city. In the works, violence is constant and stress is all-consuming. Forced to care for a family in a small house with no protection, the figure is shown alone and frightened before eventually deciding to leave.

The hyper-vivid colours of the earlier narrative images contrast sharply with the final panel. In stark black and white, the figure is found dead in the middle of the road, 300 km away from Brisbane. Through these scenes, Moffatt tells a story of the struggle for women to achieve identity, forced into domestic servitude, with the threat of violence or death ever-present should they wish to leave. The road to Brisbane becomes a metaphorical gate, a pipe dream to selfhood barred by the threat of violence. She further engages with the oppression and murder of Indigenous Australians who have suffered generations of abuse and suppression at colonial hands.

Cindy Sherman is deeply interested in the idea of the self-portrait. It is an idea that she explores, probes, dissects, and reconstructs regularly. How does one show themselves? What is included? What is left out? What do we want to say? How do we reflect an individual’s interior? In exploring these themes, Sherman constructed various characters for herself. In her works, she would take on roles such as the heroine, the damsel, and the villain, just to name a few. Her self-portraits became endless reflections of the different possibilities that a person could embody. Ostensibly documenting herself, her works become a canvas for examining the role of the individual within contemporary society. Everyone is staged; we are all participating in a collective culture, playing parts to fit into society.

Commenting on her work, Sherman stated, “When I’m shooting, I’m trying to get to a point where I’m basically not recognising myself. That’s often what it’s about.” In recent years, Sherman has begun abstracting her work, playing with form. Her most recent series, shown earlier this year, depicts Sherman in an almost surreal state, with facial features contorted at odd angles and unusual colours emerging out of black-and-white images. Sherman’s skin looks aged and wrinkled in colour, contrasting with the smoothness of the black-and-white image. Here, she becomes a collage of her past selves, fractured into place as her internal thoughts clash with her external being. Colour and black-and-white photography fight for dominance, with beauty and ageing in constant conflict.

Her work elucidates how broad a self-portrait can be and how far it can separate from a documented image.

Joseph McGlennon works with the Australian landscape to create photographic collages reminiscent of colonial eras. Within his practice, McGlennon may take hundreds of photos of his subjects before delicately assembling them, piece by piece, into a final composition. This creates vibrant composite images, akin to paintings, where every element is painstakingly constructed and arranged. In his works, everything is held in sharp focus, with his landscapes as important as the subjects he captures.

His series “The Hunt” draws inspiration from Dutch hunting scenes of the 16th century and beyond. Traditionally, these paintings would depict foxhounds and hunting dogs graphically tearing into wild boar across the snowy tundra of Middle Ages Europe. In McGlennon’s work, however, the scene is reimagined for a colonial Australian context. The foxhounds are substituted with sheepdogs, shaggy mastiffs on the lookout for escaped animals. In the background, a kangaroo is framed against the skyline, made small by perspective but also indicative of its status as a prey animal, taking over from the boar.

At the bottom of the work, we see the skull and the butterfly, emblematic of the Dutch vanitas, still present. This serves as a nod to the heritage from which the work comes.

Joseph McGlennon’s work “Bombay Wall” was a finalist in the 2011 Head On Portrait Prize.
Read more about it here

The abstracted photography of Wolfgang Tillmans attempts to capture the emotions drawn from key events in the photographer’s life. Beginning as a documentary photographer, Tillmans became a seminal figure during the AIDS crisis, intimately capturing the parties and events where his friends lived, loved, and died. As his body of work developed, he continued to evoke the power and emotion felt through queer freedom in nightlife. However, his work shifted away from literal documentation, instead capturing streaks of light and colour that represented these moments for him. Reds and blues become flashing neon signs, and long black streaks become light trails across a drunken iris.

There is a sense of freedom and fluidity in his works. The movement invites audiences to let go of themselves, be drawn into the moment of a dance, and escape from the rigid confines of the gallery space to soar through shapes and colours, only to leave with a faint memory of what occurred. His works become an allegory for queer joy and the freedom found in nightlife and among other people. At the same time, they are works of memory, echoing the brief snapshots and faint traces of lights and disco balls that are recalled once the night is finally over.

There is a dark absurdism contained within the work of pioneering photographer Mary Ellen Mark. A unique portrait photographer, she looks to capture outcasts, individuals left on the fringe of society. She captures these images by making connections, becoming friends with her subjects, and getting permission to photograph them in an intimate and personal manner. The works are disarming and intimate, presenting the vulnerabilities of people who have been discarded, swept away by society. These images are often surreal, presenting a complex combination of contrasts that juxtapose joy and hardship.

In “Amanda and her Cousin Amy, Valdese, North Carolina” (1990), two young girls are shown sitting in a paddle pool, a classic moment of youth and growing up. However, the subject, Amanda, is shown smoking a cigarette, with one arm crossed and the other resting on it. The pose recalls the grace and decorum of a 1920s noblewoman, a clever and charismatic figure found in upper-class society. The contrasts between action, pose, and individual create a surreal image that comments on the struggle of living in poverty. The cigarette becomes a symbol of hardship and struggle, while the pose symbolises ageing and knowledge. Both elements exist in disjunction with the age of the subject, a young girl forced to grow up far too fast.

That’s it! you’ve made it to the end of the list. There are so many great fine-art photographers that we missed, so keep your eyes peeled for part 2.

If you have any favourites you want to see why not send them to us? or, better yet, show us your own work.

Enter your work into AddOn, a non-competitive showcase of photography displayed as part of the Head On photo Festival, we would love to see what you have to offer.

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