David Samuel Stern
In residence: October - November 2025
David Samuel Stern is a visual artist whose practice examines photography as a physical, craft-based process and its deep relationship with portraiture and time. His work has been commissioned by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic, and exhibited at venues including Marshall Gallery (Santa Monica) and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). In 2023, he completed Unknown (American), a large-scale mixed-media commission for Washington University in St. Louis. Stern’s ongoing Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs series has taken him across Arctic regions of Alaska, Iceland, and Canada’s far north, in a long term study of photography’s bond to light, darkness, and the planetary rhythms of nature. He has taught at Pratt Institute and Penland School of Craft, with past residencies including the Ostrobothnian Photography Centre (Finland) and Cité internationale des arts (Paris).
During his residency at Artica Svalbard, Stern will continue the Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs series, this time during the transition from Polar Twilight to Polar Night. Using a self-made pinhole camera and an improvised darkroom, he will capture long-exposure images that reflect on the fragility of image-making and its mechanical intertwining of location with time. He will also document his working process and lead a public workshop in pinhole photography.