2019 Winner

Stephen Waddell was born and raised in Vancouver and began his career as an artist in the early nineties. Waddell moved to Berlin, Germany from New York in 1997 and worked there steadily for a decade. His work, which started as painting, stamped a path towards a documentary approach to photography through filmmaking and other informal means. In Berlin Waddell was not satisfied just being a witness to the tumultuous unfolding of that city’s remaking. The daily practice of photography would suit Waddell’s need to

depict the emergent and ambiguous beauty Berlin had to offer. Since 2008 Waddell has lived and worked in Vancouver and has taught since 2010 at Emily Carr University. He has published three books since 2008 in Germany and Vancouver. In 2015 Waddell began making the photographs for Dark Matter Atlas in Lebanon, Canada and the United States. This exhibition was comprised of 35 large-scale darkroom photographs shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2016 some of which are perhaps the largest traditional optical black and white photographs ever made. Waddell is currently working on a new body of colour photographs that attempt to depict real and fictive events.

See more about Stephen’s Scotiabank Photography Award exhibition here.