David Stephenson

David Stephenson was born in 1955, and studied at the University of Colorado and then the University of New Mexico, where he completed an MFA in 1982, when he moved to Australia teach photography at the University of Tasmania. A fascination for the sublime in space and time has led him to travel and photograph extensively around the world, with journeys to Europe, the Himalayas, and both the Arctic and Antarctic.

In a career spanning more than four decades, Stephenson's photographs have been exhibited extensively internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1993 and 2017), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (1994), the Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland (1995), the National Gallery of Victoria, (1998), the Cleveland Museum of Art (2001), and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2001). His work is represented in many public and private collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the French Bibliotheque Nationale, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 2005 Princeton Architectural Press, New York published Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture, a monograph of Stephenson's Domes project. In 2006 the Gulbenkian Foundation Cultural Centre in Paris presented Sublime Symmetries, a retrospective exhibition and catalogue of his photographs that included images of architecture, landscapes, and skies. In 2009, Princeton Architectural Press published Stephenson's second monograph, Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture. German editions of both were later published by Prestel Verlag, Munich. His latest monograph, Light Cities, is being published In 2024 with Hatje Cantz, Berlin.