Gavin Evans is a British photographer and artist based in Berlin, renowned for a singular and uncompromising approach to portraiture. His work dispenses with sentimentality, ornament and performance in favour of something more exacting: images of rare directness, psychological force and formal clarity. Each portrait bears the unmistakable precision of a photographer less interested in myth than in presence.
Over several decades, Evans has photographed some of the most significant figures in music, film, theatre and culture — among them David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Björk, Daniel Craig, Gary Oldman, Ian McKellen, Juliette Binoche, Ai Weiwei, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Dusty Springfield, Morrissey, Ozzy Osbourne and Terry Gilliam. He has been commissioned by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Vogue, Tempo and Esquire magazines, among others. In 2015, the Edinburgh International Festival enlisted Evans to create the visual identity for the world's largest arts festival.
Evans is best known for The Session — a forty-minute portrait sitting with David Bowie in July 1995, originally commissioned by Time Out magazine. Brian Eno was present in the studio. The resulting photographs became some of the most widely reproduced and evocative images of Bowie ever made, appearing on the covers of Rolling Stone, Paris Match and Esquire, in the V&A's David Bowie Is exhibition book, and on stage for the musical Lazarus. Evans's photographs appeared across three Sotheby's auction catalogues — an unprecedented distinction that affirmed their place within the highest tier of Bowie collecting. In 2017, the Recording Academy used Evans's portrait for the Grammy Awards tribute to Bowie. One of the photographs from the session was Bowie's personal favourite — he requested a print for his Manhattan office, and in 2012 selected the same image for the cover and final page of the V&A's Bowie Is book.
Evans's practice extends well beyond portraiture. In 1992, he created dis, a landmark work of early digital art commissioned by Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, with texts by Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Joseph Brodsky and playwright Arthur Miller. The work used nascent digital tools to map the coming age of imperceptible digital image manipulation — a subject Evans has returned to throughout his career.
Gavin also worked as a director of music videos for various artist and was represented by Partizan Productions and RSA Films.
In 2021, he became the first photographer to write an image permanently onto the Ethereum blockchain as a JPEG, using 25 ERC-721 tokens — not through a marketplace, but directly onto the chain. The project, Bowie on the Blockchain, was a direct response to the fragility and manipulability of the digital image.
His ongoing projects include Touch (2005–present), a body of over 1,500 photographs exploring physical contact, personal boundaries and body politics across cultures, and Playgrounds (2016–present), a series documenting the spaces and rituals of consensual adult play in Berlin.
Alongside his photographic practice, Gavin Evans continues his long investigation into the image, its manipulation, and the preservation of trust in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic media. That enquiry stretches back to dis (1992), his early digital artwork on the instability of image and information, which anticipated many of the anxieties that now define contemporary visual culture. It continues today in Bulletin Berlin, his independent 360º broadcasting project, conceived to protect the integrity of what is seen and said by removing edits, algorithmic interference, and the hidden spaces in which manipulation can occur. Unedited and AI-resistant by design, Bulletin Berlin is the latest expression of Evans’s enduring engagement with the politics of the image and his search for forms capable of preserving presence, accountability, and trust.
Evans lives and works in Berlin. All prints sold by The Print Room Berlin are produced from the original master files, inspected by the photographer, and embossed with a studio stamp certifying authenticity and origin.
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