Stephen W Holmes originally trained as an Industrial Designer at Prahran College of Advanced Education in inner southern Melbourne in the late 1970s, and his initial work as a product, retail and exhibition designer for several national and international companies throughout the 1980s and early 1990s helped him build his skill and a designer’s eye.

Stephen worked and travelled throughout the mid to late 1980s taking with him his trusty Minolta camera - and an extensive set of heavy lenses - around

Europe, the west coast of the USA and outback Australia, building an extensive photographic library, but at the same time also developing a creative and technical interest in the composition of images that would later become evident in his photomontage work.

Stephen has been working with computers for his industrial and graphic design work since he bought his first Apple Macintosh in 1986, but it wasn’t until his stint as a teacher at the Prahran campus of Swinburne University of Technology in the mid to late 1990s that he started looking at the computer as an artistic tool.The advent of small and relatively inexpensive inkjet printers in the Art and Design School at Swinburne started Stephen’s experimentation with computer generated images, first in purely computer graphic and 3D forms but later he developed a style that was a mixture of textural photomontage and the development of ideas and works that explored the illusion of depth and space.

At this time the work of Graeme Hare, a teacher in the same department as Stephen in the late 1990s, influenced some of his early work and also gave him the confidence to work on a larger scale than his initial ideas.

Finally in 1998, after saving the money to print and mount the first large format works, he had his first solo show at Disegno Gallery in Southbank, Melbourne.

The work for the first show, Look Up, Look Down was produced as digital Lambda Prints on Cibachrome and C-Type photographic paper and worked on the idea of creating images from straight up into the sky or straight down at the ground. Only one image had a horizon line, and that was because it was a shot of eroded soil that featured the bared roots of a tree; still within the Look Down theme.

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