Portraits 1993—2025: An exhibition by David Stephenson

Wicklow-based David Stephenson is exhibiting a selection of his photographs taken in Ireland, Africa and Central America in the last 35 years. The exhibition opening on Thursday 29 May includes an Artist’s talk and slide show.

Stephenson emigrated to London in the 1980s and lived in the heart of Soho for two years—‘an inspiring adventure for an escapee from grey Catholic Ireland,’ he recalls. His photographic career is hugely varied; he has created portraits of workers  in Honduras, Traveller families in Wicklow, refugees in Kosovo, revellers at the infamous Féile festival in Tipperary, and rural farmers in Kerry and Monaghan.  He cites Eugene Richards, Tony O’Shea and Saul Leiter as influences. 

In 2023 Stephenson won the National Gallery of Ireland’s Portrait Prize and the Photography Prizes at Ballinglen Arts Foundation & Museum of Art First Biennial exhibition and the Royal Ulster Academy Open Exhibition. This year he undertakes a commission for National Gallery of Ireland’s portrait collection.

Stephenson’s award-winning short film Raymond is an elegiac portrait of an elderly man’s recollections of life on the Irish border in County Cavan. Stephenson’s current work-in-progress Main Street  is a film-photographic  project, based in his hometown of Bray Co Wicklow. 

Although London does not feature in Stephenson’s photography  this is where his creative impulse took off, in the heart of 1980s Soho, where to paraphrase Yeats, ‘all his ladders start.’