David Samuel Stern examines photography as a physical, craft-based process, and the medium’s extraordinary relationship with portraiture. Work from his long-running series Woven Portraits has been commissioned by and appeared in publications including POLITICO Europe, National Geographic, The California Sunday Magazine, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He has had solo exhibitions at Marshall Gallery in Santa Monica, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and other venues. Stern’s recent large-scale work Unknown (American), commissioned by Washington University in St. Louis, is on display there through summer 2024. For several years, he has traveled to locations such as Finland, Alaska, Iceland, and Canada’s far north to execute his ongoing series and eventual photobook Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs, a study of photography’s bond to light, darkness, time, the planetary rhythms of nature, and the uncertain efforts behind image-making. He has taught at institutions such as Pratt Institute, Penland School of Craft, and Brooklyn Brainery. Stern lives and works in New York.