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Sam Ferris | street | Sydney

@ferriswhiskey

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📸 In every spare, waking moment
I’m making photos or
thinking about them.
In my sleep I’m dreaming them.
@burnmyeye
@aussie_street

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Dublin Street Photography Festival 2026 is delighted to welcome some incredible talent as guest speakers in May 2026.

Sam Ferris
Born in Melbourne, Australia (1985), Sam Ferris holds an Honours degree in Arts from the University of New South Wales, where he received the Vice Chancellor’s Medal and an Australian Postgraduate Award. After moving to Sydney in 2008, he began his photographic practice in earnest, co-founding the Aussie Street Festival in 2018 and joining the Burn My Eye Collective in 2021.

Ferris’ work examines the emotional undercurrents of urban life through candid, unscripted moments. “In every spare, waking moment I have, I’m making photographs or thinking about them. I walk the streets intent on capturing images that reflect not just what I see, but what I feel.”

His photographs have been exhibited internationally and published widely, including in Reclaim the Street (Thames & Hudson, 2023), 100 Great Street Photographs (Prestel, 2017), Leica Fotografie International, The Guardian, and Photo Review.

In 2024, Ferris published his second photobook, Rain Rain Go, and held solo exhibitions in Sydney as part of Head On Photo Festival and in New York City at Contact Photo. He won the $10,000 City of Sydney Australian Life Prize (2023) and has been recognised by StreetFoto San Francisco, LensCulture, Trieste Photo Days, and the Head On Photo Festival. Named Australasia’s Top Emerging Photographer in 2019 (documentary/photojournalism), he has also judged the Australian Life Prize and been a finalist in the Moran, Olive Cotton, and Gomma Awards.

His first monograph, In Visible Light (2021), sold out after three printings. Ferris lives and works in Newtown, NSW.

None of our activities would be possible without the support of our main sponsor McGarrell Reilly Group, and our hosts for 2026: Charlemont Square @charlemontsquare by @ferriswhiskey

Available on opening night. Signed exhibition catalogs. 44pp, all colour, decent paper and printing. by @ferriswhiskey

NYC lights. Here for a few more days. by @ferriswhiskey

🔤 contraste

📚 nom masculin

🔊 /kɔ ̃ .tʁast/

📝 Opposition entre deux éléments qui, en se répondant, révèlent la force de chacun.

☝ Cherchez la rencontre entre l’ombre dure et la lumière franche : c’ est souvent là que le caractère d’ une image apparaît.

💭 « Il n’y a pas de lumière sans ombre, ni de plénitude psychique sans imperfection. » —
Carl Gustav Jung

💬 L'ombre dure ou la lumière franche :
laquelle vous fait déclencher ?

📷 Sam Ferris @ferriswhiskey by @ferriswhiskey

A year or so of film fails. It made me better; it made me poorer. #kodakfilm #leicam6 #sydney by @ferriswhiskey

prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet by @ferriswhiskey

I like your old stuff better than your new stuff… by @ferriswhiskey

by @ferriswhiskey

STRAY DOGS

The photographs that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Outtakes, outliers and images made along the way - rescued from old folders, forgotten projects and unfinished stories.

Opening Fri 10 July, 6pm - 551 King St Newtown by @ferriswhiskey

Stray Dogs. Pictures from in between and with no other home. Coming soon to @studio551_newtown July 9-12. Stay tuned for opening night details by @ferriswhiskey

In Visible Light: Cinematic Street Photography from Australia — Photographs by Sam Ferris @ferriswhiskey .

A conversation with Sam Ferris about atmospheric street photography, urban solitude, and how light transforms ordinary city scenes into extraordinary moments. Sam has been acknowledged three times by the LensCulture Street Photography Awards. We are delighted to share that he is on this year's jury!

Over the course of five years, the photographer’s gaze on the city of Sydney and his craft has changed. In photographing his new home, he found belonging. In parallel, a mature vision emerged—the kind that welcomes failure and sheds influences in favor of revealing one’s own emotions.

"The photographs that endure tend to be the ones that say something genuine about the photographer rather than simply showing us what something looked like."

Read the full interview here: LensCulture.com

Share your work with him, and our other esteemed jury members!
Enter here: lensculture.com/awards by @ferriswhiskey

It’s @david.cossini with a @revoke.photo takeover!

As a member of the Burn My Eye collective and co-founder of Aussie Street, multi-award winning photographer @ferriswhiskey has become one of the defining voices in contemporary Australian street photography, helping push the genre toward something more emotional, experimental and psychologically charged.

In Visible Light is a personal street photography project shot between 2013 and the present that interrogates my perceptions and experiences of living in Sydney - a city where the cost of living has never been higher and the sense of anxiety never more acutely felt.

In 2008 I moved here to take up a university position. I didn’t know anyone. I just needed out - to escape the stifling industrial sprawl of western Melbourne I’d lived in all my life. I walked everywhere, searching for a sense of place, but Sydney made me feel impossibly alone - its pace overwhelming, its vastness indifferent. Even the light seemed hostile.

Photography became a way of making sense of that dislocation. The same light that once exposed me began to reveal something else: my own perception of the city’s beauty, struggle, and strangeness. It poured through glass towers and alleyways, punctuating my days and forcing me to look closer.

It’s there in the minutiae of the daily grind - the rush to and from the office, the endless commute, the pressure to “have it all.” It’s in the stress lines, the collisions, the fleeting gestures that betray the mask. Each frame feels like an act of compulsion, a small attempt to understand the dissonance of living here.

The more I photograph, the more urgent it feels to document this time and place - to bear witness to a city on the verge of something. A city bombarded by the fallacies of a vapid, sensationalist media; obsessed with status, riddled with uncertainty about what’s enough. A city that celebrates diversity yet still flirts with nationalism; that remembers the Martin Place siege and the Cronulla riots; that sells its soul to developers and political agendas while people quietly fall through the cracks.

Sydney is beautiful, brutal, and blinding - and through it all, the light never lets up by @ferriswhiskey