“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still” – Dorothea Lange
Thomas Pool: What can you tell us about yourself? How did you become interested in photography and what drives your practice?
David Stephenson: Both of my parents were artists. I was born into a house with bay windows, streaming seasonal light into the rooms, my father and my mother’s pictures adorning the walls, as well as my father’s library of art books and his collection of sculptures. It was like growing up in a gallery where my parents framed the world with paint and charcoal.
When I was three, my father died after a lengthy illness. Throughout my early life, there was a sense of hazy absence; it’s not a coincidence that I chose photography, with its ephemeral and ghostlike qualities. All photographs contain an absence.
I’ve always been drawn to portraiture that’s haunting, shrouded, like looking through a veil or condensation on a window. There was a sense of searching, something unanswered, in that early part of my life. When I take a photograph it feels like a search for evidence. There’s a lovely phrase by Susan Sontag that works like a mantra for me: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” It’s such a perfect and elegiac description of the uniqueness of photography.
In my lecture at the National Gallery of Ireland, I spoke about a photo by Arthur Field, ‘The Man on the Bridge’, taken of my aunt walking up O’Connell Street with a boyfriend. Both of them looking very smart and in a hurry to go somewhere. In the photograph, one of her feet is frozen in mid-air and is about to take the next step into her day. For me, it is a simple but beautiful illustration about the power of photography. My aunt, in that split second, is walking out of her past through her present and into the inevitably of a future.
I started out as an assistant to a fashion photographer in my early 20s. It wasn’t for me, but I did learn about printing. I started seriously taking photographs in my early 30s – black and white images of Ireland in the 1990s. It was an interesting time in Ireland – a time of change and flux. At the opening of my first exhibition, ‘Hard Shoulders’, which had 40 black and white images, I made a speech, saying how it was an exciting introduction to how I see the world, but that I wanted to get closer, as close as one can get to photographing a single life. I have since done two photographic/film projects about individuals living on their own in rural Ireland.
I began doing work in Central America and Africa for aid agencies in the late nineties, which was a very moving experience. I witnessed some truly remarkable and sometimes harrowing human stories. I made some very strong portraits and met amazing people. But I did think ‘Why are they sending an Irish photographer halfway across the world? Why not a local photographer who knows this world so much better than I do?’ But it was a very exciting time to be a photographer in those incredible places and to witness our common humanity. What I do now is focus on a project, something that could take me two to four years to complete.
TP: What equipment do you use? What do your editing and selection processes look like?
DS: I use a hybrid, mirrorless camera, a Canon R5. I have four really good, really sharp lenses. I flip between photographic and film projects. With film I like to work with an editor, but with photography I edit myself. I’m very meticulous and careful. I keep going back to an image again and again until I know every detail. It’s not just the selection of images, but the search for a narrative in a series of images.
With my image that won the Portrait Prize, there were details I didn’t notice until I looked at the image while editing. There can be nice discoveries during this process. The taking of a photograph is an act that takes a fraction of a second, faster than the blink of an eye, especially with street photography, although it is preceded by a lifetime of looking. Editing is the next stage in the making of an image or a body of work – its where a visual signature appears, like the alchemy of a darkroom.
TP: As AI technology grows more ubiquitous, including Apple’s new AI photo editor tool, how do you think photographers will convey authenticity and originality to their audiences going forward?
DS: During the era of Stalinist propaganda, there’s a photograph taken in a gulag. It looks like the depth of winter, snow everywhere, and it was doctored to make all the prisoners smile. Martin Parr came across the original and put the two images side by side; the contrast is stark. In the real picture, the facial expressions look haunted, no smiles – the doctoring of the image is seamless. False narratives have always been part of photography. I have no problem with people using AI to help with their workflow. AI is still quite unsophisticated, but that will change sooner or later. I imagine I’ll be able, for instance, to ask for a set of Robert Frank-like photographs taken in the late ‘50s in the American Midwest and possibly get a series of pictures that have some resemblance to his work. Why anyone would want to do that I have no idea. For me, the art of photography is in extracting moments from and engaging with the endless ‘human flow’, to make a quote from ‘time’s relentless melt.’
TP: Your photograph Ann and Ollie, Main Street, Wexford, 2023, won last year’s Zurich Portrait Prize (now the AIB Portrait Prize). When I saw the piece in the National Gallery, I felt it conveyed the loneliness we all felt during the pandemic, specifically the elderly and their losses. Can you discuss the intentionality and process behind this photograph, and what winning the Portrait Prize has meant for you?
DS: It wasn’t really about their age, or the lockdowns, which had ended by then. It was more the tableau that I saw, with Ann’s red jacket. I like photographing through windows, which is why I love the work of Saul Leiter. There was condensation on the window, so Ollie’s face was ghostlike. I shot four frames; the last frame is when Annie had that expression on her face. I didn’t look at the image for a few days, and I didn’t notice certain details until I started to edit.
This is what I love about the uniqueness of photography. If you think about it this way: Ann and Ollie are just getting on with their day, they’ve come into the cafe for a tea break and entered unknowingly into my imagined and brief tableaux. They are divided by the wooden window frame only from the street, where I am with my camera. Inside the café, there’s no divide, as they are sitting across from each other. Roland Barthes talks about the punctum of a photograph – that unexpected detail that invites us away from how we are conditioned to see a photograph. For me it was the crumpled napkin on Ollie’s plate; it indicated to me that their break was coming to an end. Ann and Ollie were finishing up and leaving behind an empty table and moving into the inevitability of their future. That’s what a photo contains for me – this powerful information, an ephemeral happening, a temporary stage and the certainty of a kind of absence as well.
Winning the Zurich Portrait Prize was a very poignant moment for me. On the night of the ceremony, there was a personal sense of a circle being completed. It was held in the cavernous Shaw Room of the National Gallery, a place of sanctuary for me as a teenager. I ended my school career by sailing past my school on the number 7 bus and spent my days wandering the vast musty rooms of the gallery, where I began my real education, enthralled by the visual storytelling of Yeats, Jellett, and Goya. In my acceptance speech, I told this story and thought of the legacy of my parents and their lives as artists.
TP: Your photographs capture and elevate everyday life. How do you view the photographer’s role as both artist and documentarian? What does this duality look like, for you and your practice?
DS: For me, it’s not a duality – it’s the same thing, and the art arises out of the documenting. For instance, my exhibition ‘Slant’, about the life and death of political posters. During the 2002 general election, I was listening to the Joe Duffy show, and people were complaining about being injured by falling election posters, one man having to get stitches in his head. The idea of the posters – with their repetitive and glib political slogans and the leering, scrubbed faces of the politicians – misbehaving, intrigued me; such a rigid language falling apart. So, I spent three years following the election posters hanging from lampposts, discarded on the side of the road, ending up as accidental montages of words, teeth, eyes, ties, clean shirts in recycling plants. On one occasion I found half a poster, the grinning white teeth of a politician, with the words, ‘At your service’ tied around a bale of plastic rubbish. So that’s how documentary and art come together for me by allowing an idea to unfold by simply following it. ‘Slant’ became a successful and well-reviewed exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland in 2004.
I come across projects it seems by accident, but I think I’m just looking for an invitation that says, this is worth a closer look. I made a film and photographic project about a man called Raymond Ovens, a Protestant farmer living on the border. Driving past his house one day when he was working in his yard, something compelled me to turn the car around and say hello. I knew within 15 minutes of meeting him that I wanted to make a film about him. There was something about the sparseness and individuality of his life that really appealed to me. It ended up winning a lot of film and photography awards. This was another instance of the art emerging out of documenting. I don’t like to explain my work away too much. I like ideas to emerge out of an image and what’s in front of me; it’s about being completely present in the act of looking. So rather than having a fixed idea and concept, and then going out to look for images to fit the idea, I like a narrative to emerge out of returning again and again to the same situation or subject and arrive at a body of work.
TP: What’s next for you? Are you working on any projects that you’d like to share with us?
DS: After winning the Portrait Prize, the National Gallery of Ireland has commissioned me to create a portrait. I don’t know who it is yet, but I hope to make an honest and truthful portrait. Portraiture, for me, is the most exciting part of my practice – real portraiture, that contains human truths, both personal and universal. There’s a look, staring back at us through thousands of years of portraiture, a human echo that I try to see when I make a portrait.
I’m also working on a film/photographic project, centred around Main Street in Bray, but taking in the other parts of the town as well. I want to capture that universality of a main street – people passing through, waiting at bus stops, sitting down for coffee, going to shops. My photograph of Anne and Ollie came out of this project as well. I want it to be a lyrical, non-narrative homage to the place I live with random bits of recorded conversation.
Next year at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, London, I have an exhibition of images I’ve taken over the last 30 years. I’m also giving a talk about my practice and a screening of some of my films.
I’m also working on an auto fiction photographic/film project about the mystery and mutability of memory using old family photographs, real life portraits and the upturned roots of trees. This is a collaboration with the poet Mark Granier.
David Stephenson is a photographer and filmmaker. His photograph, Anne and Ollie, Mainstreet, Wexford, 2023, won the Zurich Portrait Prize 2023.
