Stephen Lovell-Davis has been, at various times, a train coupler, decorator, motorcycle courier, TV presenter and, as a last desperate resort, a freelance photographer. He started his career photographing bands at gigs. 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 (NME picture editor) and his work was subsequently published in NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. He then got a holiday cover job working at the Hampstead and Highgate Express and photographed the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. 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 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 photographing Peter Gabriel himself 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 the bands Talk Talk, Mark Hollis and 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 spent several weeks of his life trapped in a car with the Top Gear and Grand Tour presenter James May on motoring and travel stories. This turned out not to be such a trial due to a shared interest in crosswords, cafes and pubs.
Equipment
For those of you with an interest in such things, I have used a variety of cameras over the years. The early 35mm pictures were taken on a Nikon F (the Apollo type - you can recognise these pictures by their rounded frame corners) and a Nikkormat FTN. Later I added a couple of Nikon FEs when the Nikkormat broke down. In 1996 I moved over to the Canon EOS 1n because their autofocus was so much better and I struggled with action photos for car and bike magazines (it helped a bit but I am fundamentally no good at action photography). I have also had several Olympus XAs, a Nikon FM2n and a Leica M6 (my favourite camera). In medium format I have used a Yashicamat, Bronica ETRS, Mamiya C330, Hasselblad 500CM, Hasselblad SWC, Mamiya RZ67, Pentax 6x7 and a Rolleiflex 3.5F. Digitally, I started with the Canon 5D mkII and since have used the 5D mkIII, Sony A7R II and a Fuji X100T.
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