‘I began my real education at the National Gallery,’ says Bray-based Zurich Portrait Prize Winner
DAVID Stephenson is an award-winning fine art photographer and filmmaker living in Bray, Co Wicklow. He’s the winner of the Zurich Portrait Prize 2023, the exhibition of which runs at the RHA until Sunday, March 10.
His work has also won photography awards at the Ballinglen International Biennial Exhibition and Royal Ulster Academy exhibition. His current film-photographic project is about Main Street, Bray, and he has work at Dublin’s So Fine Art Editions; sofinearteditions.com.
BOOK: The Years
Sometimes I come across a book I want to re-read immediately. Annie Ernaux’s ‘The Years’ is one such book – her autobiographical writing is subjective and unflinchingly personal. Here, she writes about photographs of herself at pivotal stages of her life and pulls back from these ‘slices of time’ to situate the personal in the wider social and historical context. For me, as a photographer, it’s also about the mutability of memory and the power of the photographic portrait.
I’m also reading Svetlana Alexievich’s ‘Secondhand Time’, an oral history of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and its aftermath.
FILM: North Circular
Luke McManus’s mesmerising documentary takes us on a musical journey along the North Circular Road. The motif of ballad storytelling is interwoven with stories of people living on this historical road; some offer glimpses of tragedy and sadness behind closed doors. But the film is also a celebration of community, of personal and collective agency in the face of gentrification. Filmed in black and white, it’s a lyrical and poetic document of a particular time and place in Dublin.
I also recently watched Polish director’s Pawel Pawlikowski’s masterpiece ‘Ida’.
PODCAST: New Yorker Fiction
Writers select and read a short story from the New Yorker archive.
I recently listened again to Colm Tóibín reading Mary Lavin’s ‘In the Middle of the Fields’. Tóibín’s love for Lavin’s story and her writing is demonstrated in his considered reading, in the pacing and moments of pause. The story is deeply moving. It concerns loss and how a widow is perceived by her community, in contrast to her strength and quiet fortitude. My mother was widowed at a young age, with three children to rear, so the story has some resonance for me.
EXHIBITION: Turner Watercolours Every January I look forward to the dark and intimate church-like atmosphere of the Turner exhibition at the National Gallery: simply light, pigment, water and paper.
The Gallery has a lot of meaning for me as I won the Zurich Portrait Prize in December. And when I was a dreamy teenager I spent my days in the sanctuary of the Gallery’s cavernous rooms.
This is where I began my real education – looking for hours at the paintings, beginning to understand visual storytelling.