Stephen Vaughan

Mr Stephen Vaughan

Job title: Lecturer in Photography, School of Art & Media (Faculty of Arts)
Email: stephen.vaughan@plymouth.ac.uk

Role
Lecturer in Photography

Qualifications & background

BA (Hons) Performing Arts/Music (De Montfort University)

MA Photography (University of Brighton), 2006.

While studying Music & Performing Arts as an undergraduate, I developed an interest in photographing performers and performances. This led to a 20 year career as a photographer working in theatre, opera, dance and film for companies such as Renaissance Films, Working Title, Opera North, English National Opera, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Throughout this time, I produced my own photographic work in response to the landscape, which has now become my primary interest (see 'Research').

I joined the photography team at Plymouth in 2007 as full-time Lecturer in Photography.

Research interests

I am interested in the use of photography as a means of engaging with other disciplines such as geology and archaeology. My photographs are concerned with the visual scrutiny of natural processes and phenomena including plate-tectonics, volcanism and glaciation. They also consider the landscape as a site of human encounter and revelation.

These interests have been pursued in the following bodies of work:

OpenedLandscape: Lindow, Tollund, Grauballe , is a response to the remarkable archaeological discoveries made at particular bogland sites – where the landscape itself is a system of memory. The preserved bodies of Iron-Age human sacrifices connect us with ancient historical and human events. The scrutiny of exposed ancient surfaces links the contemporary landscape directly to the Iron Age and Neolithic past.

In Ultima Thule, the persistent human urge to explore unknown territory is considered within the context of complex geological processes, over vast periods of time. Tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust are the invisible engine of change, evidenced here in volcanic fissures and steaming sulphurous pools. My photographs scrutinise the Earth as it emerges and forms, and as it is sculpted by glacial ice. The potential for transformation from beneath the surface or beyond the threshold is central to this exploration.

The series was initially inspired by the journey of Pytheas in 325 BC from the civilised Mediterranean to the far northern edges of the known world (thought to be Iceland). A number of images were made in Icelandic landscapes that are the nearest equivalent on Earth to the surface of Mars, or at sites used by Apollo astronauts for training before the first Moon landing – linking Pytheas ancient voyage to contemporary inter-planetary exploration.

My recent work was made on an expedition alongside a group of volcanologists and earth scientists, looking at ice-volcano interaction in Iceland’s sub-glacial volcano, Grimsvotn. The series Grimsvotn - Gigjukvisl looks at both the volcano eruption zone and at the site of the resulting Jokulhaup (glacial flood), where the Gigjukvisl river enters the vast Skeidararsandur outwash plain.

UoP Research group membership

Land/Water and the Visual Arts

Other research
For the last 20 years I have photographed theatre, opera and film productions for major performing arts companies including:

Renaissance Films, Icon International, Working Title

English National Opera, Opera North

Royal Shakespeare Company, The Globe, National Theatre, Complicite, Royal Court, Young Vic, Manchester Royal Exchange and Liverpool Everyman

Grants & contracts
2008 – Individual Artists Award, Arts Council England

2005 – Individual Artists Award, Arts Council England

2005 – Santa Fe Prize for Photography (nominee)

2003 – Individual Artists Award, Arts Council England

Creative practice & artistic projects

Solo Exhibitions

2009 – Lindow Moss: A Place of Finding (Manchester Museum)

2008 – Ultima Thule (Impressions Gallery, Bradford)

2005 – Opened Landscape: Lindow, Tollund, Grauballe (Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon; Photofusion Gallery, London; Picture House, Leicester)

Group Exhibitions

**2007 – Apocalypse (Candace Dwan Gallery, New York)

2007 – Trace & Transcience** (Centre for Contemporary Art & the Natural World, Exeter)

2006 – Paris-Photo (Carrousel de Louvre, Paris)

2006 – Contemporary Reflections on Photography (Brighton Photo Fringe)

2006 – Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Stone in Art (Kenny Schachter Rove Gallery, London)

2006 – Photo London (Royal Academy of Arts)

2006 – Rehearsing/Samuel Beckett (Chelsea Space)

**2005 – The Mysterious Bog People: Rituals and Sacrifice in Ancient Europe ( Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester)

2005 – Escaping:Fugitive Geography (Contact Festival of Photography, Toronto)

2004 – Strange Powers: Bog Bodies and Bog Lands photographs by Stephen Vaughan and Lennart Larsen, poetry by Seamus Heaney (University of Bradford, Gallery II, in association with the Department of Archaeological Sciences)

2004 – Trace Editions (Hirschl Contemporary Art, London)

2004 – Dislocation** (Fringe Club, Hong Kong/Lee Ka-Sing Gallery, Toronto)

My work is represented by The Photographers' Gallery , London

Publications
Findings on Ice – Pars Foundation, Amsterdam

My work as a theatre, opera and film-stills photographer has been extensively published over the last 20 years in the national press, magazines, posters and books relating to the performing arts.

Links
www.stephenvaughan.co.uk