Featherstone Street

David Stewart

Featherstone Street, by acclaimed British photographer David Stewart (b.1958), is a new series of portraits of the people who have featured throughout Stewart’s successful 40-year photographic career.

Stewart, who in 2015 won London’s prestigious Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, was inspired by his studio becoming flooded by natural daylight due to the demolition of a building opposite at the end of 2019. This occurrence temporarily transformed how he was able to work in the space. Using only the natural light and a large format camera shooting on 8×10 film, he started to photograph formally posed portraits of some of the people who had been involved in his work in a number of different ways over the past five decades.

For someone who is known for his intricately staged imagery, these portraits appear, at least initially, to be incredibly pared back. Stewart’s only request of the sitters was that they dress as if they were attending a private view. They were posed within minimal sets in whichever part of the studio Stewart felt the light worked best for the portrait, sometimes turning the sitter more towards it or in some cases allowing the light in from the side. They always remain the focal point. Yet there are subtle pointers that reflect Stewart’s relationship with them and his insider knowledge of their roles and characters, that slowly become apparent on closer viewing.

This initial stage of Featherstone Street progressed throughout the periods of UK lockdown until, in the Autumn of 2020, the building opposite started to rise again, gradually taking back the natural light and so making the exposure Stewart required for the large format 8×10 film too long to freeze his subjects. The first phase of the series features 25 portraits. Alongside the exhibition at Wren London, it is published as a book designed by Browns Editions, the designers of which Stewart has also photographed and featured here.

Creating work in a more traditional method that is fast being overlooked and ultimately lost in favour of the digital, David Stewart’s large format photographs can be considered a reaction against the ubiquity in photography heralded by the rise of social media and the notion of the universal photographer. Previously as a photographer, Stewart appears a few steps removed from his subjects, both empathising with but also at times gently mocking them, and yet here in this series Stewart uses his photography as an act of celebration of those who helped make it all possible.

Edition of 300
Published 2021
Published by Browns Editions
Designed by Browns
Set of two books
10 x 8” Landscape
16 pages
11 images
8 x 10” Portrait
20 pages
14 images
ISBN 9781916203822