David Stephenson

David Stephenson’s stunning large format photographs of
cities at night across America, Australia and Asia reveal globalized
urban sprawl, energy use, and light pollution. These
glowing “light cities” suggest much that is both good and
bad in our industrialized society: extraordinary examples of
a monumental technological sublime, where awe, beauty,
and human aspiration are tinged with the shadow of looming
environmental catastrophe, our engine of modernity
seemingly running on empty. The accompanying essay by
photographic historian Keith F. Davis discusses the evolving
idea of the city as a key theme in photography, and what
it has symbolized, from the modernist city as an engineering
feat, to the post-modernist city as a focus of energy
and information.

DAVID STEPHENSON (*1955, Washington D.C.) has lived in
Australia since 1982, when he took up a teaching post at the
University of Tasmania Art School. A fascination for vastness 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. His photographs and video works
have been widely exhibited in galleries around the world.