ABOUT
Peter Dickison is a New Zealand-Australian artist and photographer who works in both the fashion and fine-art world.
His colourful and conceptual photographs transform people, objects and places into larger-than-life characters—bold, quirky, beautiful, unsettling or strange. He builds the scene rather than finds it—hard light, strong colour, a detail that doesn't add up—raising questions then stopping just short of answering them. The viewer finds their own answers in the work.
Background
Peter trained at the Christchurch Polytechnic School of Art and Design in New Zealand, then spent a decade shooting fashion editorial and advertising in Sydney.
His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, FHM, Vogue, Noise, Oyster, Cosmopolitan, Cleo, Max, Girlfriend, B, Minx, New Woman, 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.
He documented Sydney’s vibrant underground rave, club and dance-party scene through the 1990s and early-2000s, regularly shooting covers and fashion editorial for progressive street-culture magazines Catalog, Large, 3D World, and Substance, as well as photographing many local and international DJs and musicians, including INXS, Boy George, The Prodigy, Corduroy, CDB, Infusion, Mark Dynamix, Pee Wee and Nervous.
He stepped away from photography in the early 2000s—military service then co-founding UK technology publication Bit-Tech.net, where he became a pioneer in the mid-2000s tech-art scene. Working under the name ‘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 Financial Review, Atomic, CPU, Custom PC, FHM, Maximum PC, Microcomputer, Digg.com, Slashdot.org, the TV show Mythbusters, and in books such as Digital Hotrods and PC Modding For Dummies.
After attaining a BA in English and Creative Writing in the 2010s, he worked as a writer and designer for global technology companies before returning to full-time photography in 2025.
His visual language comes from several places: a childhood of clear New Zealand light; the absurdist wit and surrealism of British comedy; the retro-futurist aesthetic of 1970s and 1980s science fiction; the bold colour and stylised narratives of fantasy illustration, tabletop role-playing game art and 8-bit computer games; his academic studies in literature, surrealism and storytelling; and a neurodivergent way of noticing what doesn’t fit before noticing what does.
He's based in Sydney and available for commissions worldwide.
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"I try to make images that earn a second look—not through spectacle alone, but through the tension between contradictions held together without resolution. I'm drawn to the moment when something familiar becomes strange, when two irreconcilable truths occupy the same frame and refuse to explain each other—the beautiful and the unsettling, the absurd and the ordinary. I build these scenes carefully, and leave enough unsaid so a viewer has to bring themselves to the work. What they find in the gap between what's shown and what's withheld will be partly mine but mostly theirs. Because a work of art isn’t completed when I’ve made it and it’s hanging on a gallery wall or published—it’s completed when it’s viewed and enters the consciousness of the viewer: they complete it and give it a meaning unique to them."