ABOUT
Peter Dickison is a New Zealand-Australian photographer specialising in commercial and editorial fashion and fine-art photography.
He creates stories with narrative images that turn reality into fiction: staging scenes that transform people, objects and places into larger-than-life characters—bold, quirky, beautiful, unsettling or strange.
With a career that began in the analogue film era, he brings the skills required for shooting film to his digital and moving-image work: emphasising in-camera authenticity, creativity, and capturing behind-the-scenes stories for brands to share with their audience.
Based in Sydney, he has worked worldwide, with a professional history spanning Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Europe.
Peter lives near Sydney’s Cronulla beach, with its laid-back vibe, palm trees and surf. He’ll often be found walking the Esplanade, camera in-hand, or shooting on location along the coastline.
Background
Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, Peter discovered photography while working in front of the camera as an actor and model. He studied professional photography at the Christchurch Polytechnic School of Art & Design in the early 1990s, and assisted local and international fashion and advertising photographers while shooting his own commercial work and working as a film location scout around New Zealand’s South Island. After graduating, he moved to Sydney to work as an editorial fashion and portrait photographer.
His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, FHM, Vogue, Noise, Oyster, Cosmopolitan, Cleo, Max, Girlfriend, B, Minx, Juice, The International Hairdressers Journal, Total Sports, Music Trader, The Scotsman Magazine and many other publications.
With past representation by Mari Vendrame Management and the Network Agency, he has worked with global brands that include Sony Music, V2 Records, Mattel, Inc./Barbie, Amnesty International, W.&L.T., Filomena Natale, Scotch & Soda, Toni & Guy, and Converse.
As both an observer and a participant, he documented Sydney’s underground rave and dance-party scene through the 1990s and early-2000s, regularly shooting covers and fashion editorial for progressive street-culture magazines like Catalog, Large and Substance, as well as photographing a who’s who of local and visiting international DJs and musicians, including INXS, Boy George, The Prodigy, Corduroy, CDB, Infusion, Mark Dynamix, Pee Wee and Nervous.
Moved by the events of September 11, 2001, Peter stepped away from the camera to serve with the Australian Army, graduating from the Royal Military College (Duntroon) as a commissioned officer, with subsequent postings to commando and special operations units in support of the War on Terror.
Alongside his military service, Peter was a pioneer in the mid-2000s tech-art scene. As one of the founders of leading UK technology publication Bit-Tech.net, and working under the pseudonym ‘G-gnome’, his viral computers-as-art projects were featured in online and print publications in Australia, the USA, Europe and Asia, including Wired, Forbes, The Australian, Atomic, CPU, Custom PC, FHM Spain, Maximum PC, Microcomputer, Digg.com, Slashdot.org, the TV show Mythbusters, and in books such as Digital Hotrods and PC Modding For Dummies.
In the 2010s, he returned to academic studies, attaining a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Macquarie University - graduating as the Faculty of Arts highest-achieving student, shortlisted for the Monash Prize: Australia’s national undergraduate writing award. As a writer, his short stories have been published in literary journals Southerly and The Quarry. From 2017, he worked in the corporate world as a UX writer and designer for global technology companies, helping improve the usability of products used by companies such as Apple, Netflix, Meta and SpaceX.
Leaving the corporate world and returning to professional photography full-time in 2025, Peter has come full circle. He now approaches image-making with a writer’s sense of narrative and a UX designer’s knowledge for how people experience images.
His current practice is a balance of commercial work and personal projects driven by influences as diverse as noir literature, technology, swimming pools, surrealism, pop art, fashion and beauty, tabletop role-playing games, 1980s aesthetics, bodybuilding, science fiction, competitive video gaming, and pop/nerd culture.
He views his personal projects as the foundation of his practice: an area in which to take creative risks and explore ideas while maintaining a consistent visual language across both his commercial and fine-art work.
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Peter currently accepts commissions in Australia and internationally.
For project inquiries or to discuss a specific brief, please reach out via the Contact page.
