David Stephenson (photographer)

[1] His photographic subjects have included landscapes from America to Australia, the Arctic and Antarctica, the Southern Ocean, European sacred architecture, and day- and nighttime skyscapes.

[2] He moved to Albuquerque in 1979 to start graduate studies at the University of New Mexico, working under Thomas Barrow, Beaumont Newhall, and Van Deren Coke.

[2] Photographing across the American Southwest and California from 1979 to 1981 with a large format camera, and inspired by artistic precedents from Carleton Watkins to Robert Smithson, he produced his first major body of work, New Monuments, which focussed on industrial structures in the landscape.

Responding to the Pipeline’s linearity and influenced by 19th century photographers such as Watkins, he first worked with panoramic composites in Alaska, a pictorial strategy he would return to periodically for subsequent series.

Stephenson completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico in 1982 with an exhibition of the Alaskan panoramas, and a dissertation on the 19th century photographers of the transcontinental railroad.

ISBN 9780810919648 Keith F. Davis: An American Century of Photography: From Dry Plate to Digital (2nd Edition, Revised and Enlarged), Abrams, New York, 1998.

ISBN 9780975190173 Jan Schall, editor: Tempus Fugit: Time Flies, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and University of Washington, Seattle, 2001.

Susan Van Wyk: “David Stephenson - The Ice”, in Charles Green and Jason Smith: Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2002, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2002.