Stephen Vaughan

CV ⁄ Biography

1968 Born in Cheshire, England.

1986-89 Studied with composer Gavin Bryars and saxophonist Evan Parker at De Montfort University’s School of Performing Arts. Co-devised and performed a production of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which won the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Buzz Goodbody Award at the National Student Drama Festival. Also wrote and performed Smokami, a large-scale work based on a series of Anglo-Saxon poems, for soprano soloist, male-voice choir and percussion orchestra.

Began photographing student performances of theatre and dance. Received informal photographic tuition from artist Greg Lucas and printer Andrezej Jablonski at De Montfort University’s Lens Media Department.

1990-2004 Worked as a photographer specialising in the performing arts. Regularly commissioned by major companies to photograph theatre, opera and dance productions, as well as a number of feature films, including the forthcoming film The Reckoning (Renaissance Films/Paramount Classics), starring Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany. Images from this body of work have been widely published in the national and international press, magazines, books and posters.

1995-2002 Developed an entirely separate body of fine-art work, made primarily in landscapes connected to archaeology, history, memory and myth.

2002-03 Produced Opened Landscape: Lindow, Tollund, Grauballe, a series of large-format colour photographs of three sites, connected by the discovery of preserved Iron-Age, sacrificial bog burials. Supported by an Arts Council England award.

Feb 2004 Images from the Opened Landscape project were featured in the exhibition Strange Powers: Bog Bodies and Bog Lands, produced in association with the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford. The exhibition also featured photographs by Danish photographer Lennart Larsen, as well as the poems that were inspired by Larsen’s images, spoken by Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.

2004 Received second award from Arts Council England. Currently working on a new project Ultima Thule, tracing the archaeological evidence surrounding the journey of Pytheas of Massalia in 320 BC to the far northern edges of the known european world, Iceland and the Arctic Circle.