Stephen Hobson’s career has spanned working in both England and Australia. He has been the director of two regional arts galleries, a university lecturer, a freelance arts consultant, an arts funding officer, has directed businesses, and managed training programs considered national role models in the UK. He has organised and curated over fifty exhibitions, including exhibitions of Australian Aboriginal art, and curated exhibitions of work by artists including Brook Andrew, Andy Goldsworthy, Mark Power, John Davies and others. He has exhibited his own art for over thirty years in public and private galleries, such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Camerawork, (London), Watershed (Bristol), Queensland Centre for Photography (Brisbane) and the State Library of Queensland, and held exhibitions in the UK, France, USA and Australia, with examples held in prominent international collections, such as the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Arts Council of England, and leading private collections in Australia, such as the Darryl Hewson Collection.

He has contributed to and edited a number of publications, including co-editing a book on photography and death, dying and bereavement, titled Intimations of Mortality, with Dr Stephanie Brown. He was a consultant editor to Photo-Art International, an editor of Re-View and has published in leading art journals like Perspekief. Stephen has an honours degree in Fine Art from Falmouth School of Art, an MA from the University of Exeter, and a PhD from Griffith University. His research is currently focussed on the relationships between photography, intimacy, the Self and Other. Stephen was born in Romford, in England, and immigrated to Australia in 2000. He currently teaches art theory at Griffith University Queensland College of Art.

The ‘Intimacy Series’ (2004-2008) examines the nature of intimacy, and represents the culmination to date of a photography project begun in 1979 exploring human relationships. Over the years the work has explored both small incidental moments and acknowledged social rituals of love and grief such as marriage and death, and the celebration and breakdown of relationships; it is a visual discourse centred on emotions and feeling over thinking.

The ‘Intimacy Series’ seek responses from the viewer to unusual conjunctions of skin and cloth that evoke looking, touch and shape, and by implication suggest more historic ideas of intimacy than those commonly recognised today. The photographs suggest that intimacy has aspects to it that are uncanny (in the Freudian sense), that intimacy does not always have to be invested in interpersonal human relationships, and that photography can represent the subtle and subjective intricacies of feelings like intimacy to better our knowledge and understanding of each other.

Each image (1320mm x 960mm plus border) was made using a flatbed scanner. Using the scanner was a performative process akin to mid 19th century portraiture, because the high resolution required for large digital prints necessitated posing for over two minutes. Aside from spotting, dodging and burning they were all made without manipulation, and, as often occurs with a camera and film, each image displays circumstantial evidence of the process.