Brett Canét-Gibson has a 35-year career as an image maker, Creative Director, writer and communicator in portrait, still life and landscape commercial and editorial photography, graphic design and visual arts. He has worked extensively in the print media, design and entertainment industries, and has received many international, national and local portrait and editorial awards.
His portraits are typically of people he has encountered on the street, taken using natural light and a portable backdrop. He says that he uses the city as his casting agency and the sidewalk as his studio.
Over the past five years alone, Canét-Gibson’s work has been exhibited in major international photographic competitions including the PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris (where he received the Gold Award); the fine art/still life category of the IPA International Photography Awards in New York (third prize); the International Fine Art Photography Award, London (second prize); the Kuala Lumpur International Photoawards (finalist) and the London Photo Festival Abstract and Fine Art Photography Competition (second runner-up).
Across Australia, his work has been chosen for four exhibitions of the National Photographic Portrait Prize of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. In 2017, unusually, two of his portraits were chosen for exhibition. Remarkably, one, Mastura, was the judges’ runner-up and the other, Trevor, was the people’s choice winner and later acquired for the Gallery’s permanent collection. In 2015, Canét-Gibson’s image was the people’s choice at Sydney’s hotly contested Head On Photo Festival; the exhibition later showed in New York and Hyderabad. He has won Queensland’s DUO Percival Photographic Prize and been chosen as a finalist in Victoria’s Bowness Photography Prize and New South Wales’s Olive Cotton Award.
In Western Australia, Brett has won the City of Swan Art Award and been chosen as a finalist in the Mandorla Art Award and CLiP (Contemporary Landscapes in Photography). He has exhibited at the Office of Multicultural Interests at Elizabeth Quay, and in SCARP – The Alternative Archive Exhibition, a collaboration with Curtin University and the State Government in Dwellingup. His work is included in the State Library’s Permanent Archives Pictorial Collection, which aims to cover and preserve all aspects of WA's history and stories.
Over 2020-2021 two of his portraits – of Spinifex man Trevor Jamieson; and of Ian Thorpe, taken at the World Swimming Championships in Perth in 1998 – are touring Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition The Look, comprising the most arresting images from its collection of contemporary photographs.
