Artist Interview: Conversation with David Stephenson

David Stephenson lives and works in Lutruwita/Tasmania. His practice includes long exposure photography and explores environmental representation and the sublime.

Sun Drawings is a series of both digital inkjet and unique analogue prints that explores the contrasting scales of human, geological, and cosmic time. Through long-exposure landscape photography, Stephenson foregrounds duration, stillness and presence. The camera becomes a witness to temporal structures that exceed human perception, positioning the viewer within vast fields of time that extend far beyond everyday experience.

This interview between David Stephenson and Chris Amor, MAMA Public Programs Officer, occurred in July 2026.

In Sun Drawings, you trace the movement of the sun through exposures of varying lengths. Many of these works capture both a sense of stillness in the present, and the passing of time simultaneously, while others trace the dancing movement left by the sun in isolation of landscape - I would love to hear how these differing approaches speak to each other in the series.

I have always been interested in the rhetoric of art, and how particular visual motifs and styles influence our understanding of an image. Alongside this is my fascination with our perception of photography as a factual medium, and how this is being challenged by AI generated imagery. For me the veracity of the photograph lies more in its relationship to time than its optical verisimilitude. I wanted to juxtapose recognizable landscape views that testify to a long history of the sublime and picturesque in art with more abstract images that remove any reference to a location to explore the concept of photographic truth. Both approaches indelibly record the passage of time onto the film, and in this sense are equally truthful.

Through your career you have worked with both digital and analogue mediums, I’m wondering if the choice to return to silver gelatin prints for this series was purely aesthetically driven, or whether the analogue process also held a kind of alignment with the conceptual notions of the work?

Silver prints have a unique quality of tonality and depth that is quite different from digital ink, which seems to sit more on the surface of the paper. After exclusively making large digital prints for the past couple of decades, I was curious to return to the roots of my photographic practice in the late 1970s, by making quite modestly sized handmade silver prints. Analogue film, and optical prints particularly, are quite unforgiving to use in comparison to the infinite mutability of the digital image, which can always be altered in the computer. I wanted to compare the visual qualities of the two approaches and also see if their differences affect our perception of photographic veracity.

You have described the centre of your practice as being a meditation on the sublime. Through previous series this has taken the form of expansive landscapes, sacred architecture, and explorations of the celestial. Could you speak to your interest in the sublime, and how your current series Sun Drawings sits within this ongoing exploration?

For me the sublime is about my emotional experience of awe - the imaginative repositioning of myself within the enormous scale of cosmic time and space. To be clear, I don’t think any of my work provides an experience of the sublime, but only points to it. The Sun Drawings are definitely an extension of some of my earlier projects, particularly the Star Drawings, in using my own stillness and the fixed position of my camera, in this case using the rotation of the earth, to create time-based drawings of light onto film. The spin of the earth and the apparent movement of the sun, which our biological clocks are totally linked to, is our most fundamental experience of the passage of time. As humans we completely rely on and are dwarfed by the sun, and I find this daily reminder of being a tiny and insignificant creature within an immensely old and vast universe to be very nourishing to my soul.

David Stephenson is a finalist of the 2026 National Photography Prize, presented by the MAMA Art Foundation.

On until 22 November 2026

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch