Stephen Livick

Stephen Livick (born February 11, 1945) is an innovative photographic artist and printmaker living in London, Ontario. His career dates from 1974 as a full-time photographer. For him, the real magic began in the dark room. He mined the potential of photographic technology.

In 1974, he invented a photographic printing process that combined Laser Techniques and Gum Bichromate, wedding modern technology with historic procedure. Using his new way of printing photography, he could make images very large in size, even eight by 12 feet (perhaps a first for Canada) as in his Kolkata series. They have a distinctive, rich effect with soft, muted, mysterious colour, and have the "qualities of paintings". He used the new technique often in his photography shows, one of which was called a "dazzling breakthrough" by Maclean's magazine.

Livick also produced gelatine, silver, cyanotype and platinum prints. He grew up in Montreal where he attended Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University). He had no formal training in photography but found instructive ten years of work from 1963 on in commercial photographic studios in Montreal and Toronto. Another solo show in 1975 was held at George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, New York.

About 1976, influenced by Diane Arbus he began to change his photographic practise from nature and objects to people. The result was an important body of work about America in its Bicentennial year of 1977 titled "Amerika", a Portfolio of platinum prints. Later he pointed his camera at the entertainment industry in North America, and developed several series, including ones he titled "Middle America" (1981) and "Joints" (1982). For the Middle America series, he travelled from Timmins, Ontario to the Carolinas in the United States, but unlike the freaks of Arbus, he photographed ordinary people He made nine trips to India between 1984 and the early 1990s. In 1993, he had a highly praised solo show with a catalogue titled Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (now part of the National Gallery of Canada), Ottawa.

In the 1990s, India continued to absorb him. In 1990, produced a series he called "Portrait of a Country Fair" shown the Sarnia Art Gallery in Ontario (now the Judith and Norman Alix art gallery). In 2017, a show Stephen Livick: Midway, going back to his work in the early 1980s, was held at the Woodstock Art Gallery, guest curated by Matthew Ryan Smith. and Seeing People, Seeing Space: Contemporary Photography from Ontario, Canada held at The Photographers Gallery in London, Ontario (1994). In 2024, he was included in the Winnipeg Art Gallery's (the WAG-Qaumajuq's)'s four-person exhibition featuring work from the permanent collection Animating the Figure with Photography curated by Dr. Stephen Borys, WAG-Qaumajuq Director & CEO.

Selected public collections Livick's work has been widely collected, both in Canada and abroad in the following selected institutions: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (163 works); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (3 works); The Image Centre, Toronto; Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG-Qaumajuq) (40 works); Museum London, London, Ontario (31 works); McIntosh Gallery, Western University, Ontario (over 50 works); Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York (13 works); Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fogg Art Museum, Boston;