Photography: Standing Out in the Age of Image Overload
How do today’s photographers stand out – and who’s collecting their work?
In today’s world, photographic images proliferate at an extraordinary rate, serving as the currency through which we share our personal narratives. This begs the question: where does that leave photography as an art form? Has the prevalence of the camera phone, AI, social media, and algorithmic visibility enhanced – or diluted – photography’s creative and cultural value?
This panel explores how leading contemporary photographers navigate this evolving landscape, maintain artistic voice, and build a lasting presence in both the public imagination and the collector’s eye.
George Byrne | Speaker
Amber Creswell Bell | Moderator
Leila Jeffreys | Speaker
Lisa Sorgini | Speaker
wani toaishara | Speaker
George Byrne creates large-scale photographs that depict everyday surfaces and landscapes as painterly abstractions. Borrowing from the clean, vivid clarity of modernist painting, he also references the New Topographics photography movement via a subject matter firmly entrenched in the urban everyday. “I’d always been interested in anti-landscape photography, but it wasn’t until I moved to LA and started shooting in colour and experimenting with manipulation and assemblage that I felt I was able to do anything very expressive or original with it. The images I’m making now are quite removed from reality, but I tend to bury the lead and not let the seams distract. Hence the effect is hopefully one of pleasure and disconcertion. They are dreamscapes.” – GB. Born in Sydney in 1976, Byrne graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2001, travelled extensively, and then settled in Los Angeles in 2011 – where he now lives and works.
Amber Creswell Bell is an art curator, an author of books on the arts, a lifestyle writer, a public speaker, and artist mentor. She was the Director of Emerging Art for Michael Reid galleries, curating both the emerging art and ceramics programs from 2019-2025. In 2021 Amber established the National Emerging Art Prize (NEAP) in collaboration with Michael Reid. Amber has been curator of the NEAP since its inception. Amber has published seven art books with Thames & Hudson to date: Her first book, Clay, released October 2016, showcases over 50 contemporary ceramic artisans from Australia and abroad. Amber’s second book, A Painted Landscape, released in October 2018, profiles the diverse work of 50 of Australia’s landscape painters. 2021 saw the release of Amber’s monograph on artist Ken Done ‘Art. Design. Life’, as well as Still Life – a compilation of Australian still life painters which won Illustrated Non-fiction Book of the Year at the Indie Book Awards. Australian Abstract, was released in March 2023, and was awarded Illustrated Book of the Year at the Australia Book Industry Awards. About Face was released in September 2024, profiling Australian and New Zealand portrait and figurative painters. Exposure, released September 2025, is her latest release.
Leila Jeffreys is a renowned contemporary artist working across photography, moving image and installation. She is best known for images of birds, photographed at human scale, that explore and subvert the conventions of portraiture. Jeffreys, who lives and works in Sydney with her husband and son, sees her avian subjects as living beings, part of a practice that expands viewer’s hearts by drawing attention to interdependence between species. Jeffreys’ work is a result of years-long periods of research and exploration. In the tradition of artist-activists, she conducts fieldwork, collaborates with conservationists, ornithologists and sanctuaries and champions programs to protect and restore endangered habitats. Jeffreys has exhibited in Australia and around the world for fifteen years, everywhere from Sydney and Melbourne to Paris, Brussels and Los Angeles. In 2023, her work was curated into The Best in Show at Fotografiska in New York, as part of an exhibition dedicated to animals in contemporary photography that toured Tallinn and Stockholm. She featured alongside the world’s most respected photographers as part of Civilisation: The Way We Live Now, a landmark 2023 exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery.
Lisa Sorgini is an Australian/Italian artist who works in still photography. She investigates themes of the human condition: caregiving, motherhood, memory and familial spaces. Within her two long-form projects, Mother and In-Passing, Lisa uses personal experience combined with sociological research to reveal complex narratives about the representation of women, mothers, and care roles in current cultural spaces. Other notable works include Behind Glass, which considers motherhood during the COVID-19 pandemic; The Bushfire, the Flood, addressing climate anxiety and place; and Thick Like Water, focusing on family dynamics. In 2025, her work The Bushfire, the Flood was exhibited at Rencontres d’Arles as part of On Country: Photography from Australia, and she published her second monograph, In-Passing, through Libraryman. Sorgini’s work has been profiled extensively in prominent outlets such as The New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times, and The Guardian. In 2022, she released her debut monograph, Behind Glass (2022), and in 2023 held her first solo show at The Centre for Contemporary Photography, Australia. Her work has also been showcased at numerous international festivals, including PhEST, Landskrona Photo Festival, Ragusa Photo Festival, and the Ballarat Photo Festival, as well as receiving nominations and awards, including the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, the National Portrait Prize, the Lucie Portrait Project, and Portrait of Humanity.
wani toaishara’s practice incorporates performance, video installations and image-making, which are informed by his ongoing explorations of Indigenous Black African subjectivity. toaishara works in an approach he describes as auto-ethnographic, and his practice often employs material forms and aesthetics traditionally associated with the African diaspora. His performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination intertwine. Drawing on the quotidian visual traditions across the African continent, toaishara’s work engages with the diverse Black cultural histories and complex experiences across the diaspora. toaishara’s site-responsive approach considers the relationality between cultural materiality, memory, and place, unpacking connections between historical narratives and contemporary realities.
A valid ticket to Sydney Contemporary 2025 is required for entry to this talk. We recommend arriving 10 minutes before the talk’s start time. Buy tickets now.
Image Credit: George Byrne, 99c Culver City, 2017. Image Courtesy of George Byrne and Thames & Hudson Australia.
