Sydney Contemporary 2026 | Photography

Across our Sydney Contemporary presentation, five of Australia’s most awarded and original photographers draw us into their distinct visual worlds. Among the defining image-makers of her generation, Tamara Dean arrives at the fair amid an extraordinary run of recognition for her forthcoming series The Garden, with works from the project shortlisted for four major accolades over the last three months, including this year’s Bowness Photography Prize. Moving between terrestrial and underwater settings, The Garden entwines bodies, flowers and fabric in dreamlike compositions that explore femininity, transformation and our entanglement with the natural world.

Newly represented Murray Fredericks makes his first art fair appearance with Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin ahead of his inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery in October. Bringing together works from his seminal Salt and Blaze series, his Sydney Contemporary showing reflects almost three decades of sustained solitary immersion in remote environments, distilling light, horizon and elemental interventions into images of arresting stillness and psychological intensity.

Following the resounding success of his recent Aotearoa Art Fair presentation, Scott Perkins debuts a new suite of brooding forest landscapes. Light, material and illusion sit at the core of the artist’s highly atmospheric practice. Best known for her extraordinary portraits of birds photographed at human scale, Leila Jeffreys – whose representation by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin was announced this week – has spent more than 15 years subverting the conventions of portraiture, bringing an arresting intimacy to subjects more commonly observed at a distance.

Rounding out our photography exhibition, internationally lauded artist Petrina Hicks unveils her photographic duet The Fates on the heels of a notable run of record-breaking auction results for her historical works. The subject of major institutional surveys at the NGV and Museum of Australian Photography, Hicks has honed an ultra-refined visual language in which uncanny stillness and seductive polish are undercut by subtle tension and ambiguity, drawing on motifs from classical myth, folklore and art history to conjure images poised between beauty and disquiet.

Explore more from our Sydney Contemporary exhibition here. For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au