[4] His work was included in The Active Eye, the first survey of contemporary New Zealand photography, mounted by the Manawatu Art Gallery in 1975.

One of the works used to advertise the exhibition in Europe was Dead Steer (1987), which depicts the bloated carcass of a cow on a rural roadside.

[7] In the 1997 Queen's Birthday Honours, Peryer was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to photography.

)[12] In a review of Peryer's early activity in late 1977 critic Neil Rowe wrote "Although he has been taking photographs seriously for only two years he has achieved a highly distinctive style and an intensely personal repertoire of imagery".

[16] The exhibition curator Justin Paton wrote at the time: Nothing in New Zealand photography of the seventies has the same psychological charge or stark glamour.

[15]In a 1989 article looking back over the first 15 years of Peryer's photography career, curator Ann Elias wrote: The group of powerful human portraits that established Peryer's reputation in the second half of the nineteen-seventies were often melodramas in which he romanticised the subject (himself, Erika, Christine Mathieson and others) through devices many artists have used in the same deliberate way – a dark and grainy technique to intensify the mystery; the choice of a haunted, confrontational or tragic expression to intensify the seriousness; and the incorporation of objects, sometimes extraneous (a rooster, a fish), often clothing, to intensify the narrative.

[17]Writing in the mid 1990s, curator Robert Leonard observed "Peter Peryer made his name as an expressive photographer producing angst-ridden portraits.

[20] He noted that "While Peryer draws on movements and artists as distinct as Constructivism, German avant-garde photography, and Moholy-Nagy, his intellect saves this from being merely an art-historical tour to mould it into a highly-personal visual ideology".