Born at Fairlight in Sydney, New South Wales, to Australian-born Alice (née) Steele and Edward Wesley, a bank clerk who was English migrant and a Sunday painter.
For three years he attended Trinity Grammar Boarding School from 1953-55 and while there, and encouraged by his mother and his cousin David Stacey, took up photography, constructing and using a pinhole camera and a Box Brownie.
Aged twenty-three in 1964, held his first exhibition of photography; the thirteen large black and white prints on board in A Showing of Photographic Panels at Goldstein Hall in the University of New South Wales in June strongly evidenced his Christian faith and church activities and his interest in Sidney Nolan's and Russell Drysdale's expressionist Central Australian landscapes.
In 1968 Stacey returned to "find his Australian roots" and joined Gareth Powell's Chance and POL magazines in Sydney then until 1976 freelanced as a commercial photographer specialising in architecture, travel, environment and heritage.
Robust yet elegant; simple in concept yet complex; humble yet daunting: spatially, these structures were to have a profound effect on architects searching for a genuinely Australian character.
Amidst vociferous land rights protests at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games, representing this groundswell of change was After the Tent Embassy: Images of Aboriginal History In Black and White Photographs at the Bondi Pavilion.
"[12] Only one of the photographers involved with the project, Langton, was Indigenous, which Catherine De Lorenzo considers "is as much a reflection of unequal access to education and resources as it is evidence of strong commitment by sectors of the settler population toward a more equitable society;" Tweedie, Gemes, Jon Rhodes, and many others, with Stacey, were "forging a new visual poetics within activist politics.
"[12] From 1993 Stacey continued to live on the far south east coast and took up use of a panoramic camera for monochrome and colour landscapes and skyscapes in Australia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Brittany and England.