Wesley Stacey (1941–2023), photographer, was an apprentice silk screener and studied drawing and design at East Sydney Technical College in the early 1960s before working as a graphic designer and photographer in Sydney and London. In 1968-9 he was a staff photographer for POL and Chance magazines. Establishing the Australian Centre for Photography with David Moore in 1973-4, he freelanced as a commercial photographer until 1975, his images published in books including Rude Timber Buildings in Australia (1969), Kings Cross Sydney (1971), Historic Towns of Australia (1973) and The Artist Craftsman in Australia (1977). In 1975 he set out around Australia in a camper van, recording his environment with a Kodak Instamatic. He spent two years working with Gubbo Ted Thomas and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies photographing heritage sites, and his interest in Australian landscapes continued through the 1980s, when he produced panoramic photographs exploring symbols and sacred aspects of the bush. He has lived for decades on the south coast of New South Wales. Stacey has held solo exhibitions since 1964 and many hundreds of his photographs are in the collections of major Australian galleries. The Monash Gallery of Art presented a survey of four decades of his photographs, The Wild Thing, in 2017.
