Stephen Lovell-Davis

Stephen Lovell-Davis started his career photographing bands at gigs as a fan. As a result of an incident at one of these where he got into a fight with Pete Townshend of The Who, he came to the attention of Chalkie Davies (then NME picture editor) and his photographs of the burgeoning punk scene were subsequently published in NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. He worked as an assistant to advertising and editorial photographer Alan Randall and got a holiday cover job working at the Hampstead and Highgate Express during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year. These jobs led on to other editorial work over the next few years, mainly portraiture and reportage featuring in: Vogue, The Independent Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Country Life, Time Out and Q.

After photographing the artists on the Turner Prize shortlist for the Tate Gallery and Channel 4 for two years, he was invited to join a project photographing visual artists for the musician Peter Gabriel. This led to him photographing Peter Gabriel and many world music artists for CD covers on the Real World record label. He has also provided album cover artwork and publicity pictures for Eddie and the Hot Rods, Talk Talk, Mark Hollis and the band Pig.

He has done a good deal of work for automotive magazines including: Top Gear, Car, Bike, Performance Bike and Land Rover Magazine. As a part of his work for Car and Top Gear magazine he has travelled the world in a car with the presenter James May where they discovered a shared interest in motorcycles, beer and crosswords.

His non-commercial work ranges from photographs of this workmates on the railways in the early eighties (some of which were exhibited in IPE165 at the Royal Photographic Society in 2024) to a 2013 project about the flat he had lived in for twenty years called ‘See Our Golden Dreams Come To Nothing’. In 2012 he exhibited a series of personal photographs entitled ‘Selective Memory’ at the Underground Gallery in Charing Cross.