Luke Hardy was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1957. He has a bachelor’s degree in English and Australian literature from the University of Sydney and a master’s degree Latin American studies from the University of New South Wales. He has lived and worked in the United Kingdom (1979–80), Thailand (1983–84 and 1991–92), and Indonesia (1992–93). In the 1980s, he made an extensive documentation of the Indochinese refugee diaspora for a number of UN publications.
He was a writer, consultant, and stills photographer on two television documentaries, in Laos (1989) and in Iran (1991). His first exhibition, which documented Iraqi Kurds border-crossing into Iran, was presented alongside work by the Japanese photographer Masanori Kobayashi in Sydney Opera House, before touring to Canberra, Melbourne, Wellington, and Tokyo (1991–92). Since then, his work has featured in eleven solo exhibitions and more than a dozen group shows in Australia. His photographs are held in a number of private collections in Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the USA. His images have been included in a number of art publications, including ‘Burma: Art and Archaeology’ [The British Museum 2002], and ‘Australian Photography and Gallery Compendium’ [Daylight Productions 2012]. He lives and works in Sydney.