Stu Sontier (New Zealand, b. 1959) is a photographer who works experimentally with digital materials, exploring the materiality of photographically derived imagery.His process often uses damaged or obsolete equipment, such as failing inkjet printers and second-hand papers.Born in England, he has lived in New Zealand since he was eight, and is based in Auckland.,His work is informed by environmental concerns, including climate change and ecological uncertainty.
Sontier began as a documentary photographer working with traditional silver gelatin printing, shown in group and solo exhibitions and in the book Ink and Silver. He served on the PhotoForum committee from 1996 to 2016 and initiated and managed the organisation's website. In 1993 he collaborated with the artist Jon Carapiet on the HYDRA Project, shown in shop windows and later at the Auckland Public Library.The two continued to work separately and together, showing concurrent exhibitions at Hum Salon, Auckland, in 2019.
Collapse, shown at Refinery Artspace in Nelson in 2021, uses failing inkjet printers to produce stark, segmented images built from black lines, numbers, and washes of cyan, the colour manufacturers use for print head alignment charts.Sontier connects the project's title to quantum wave function collapse, climate tipping points, and colony collapse disorder in bees.His earlier series ether, launched online in 2017, explores what he calls the one-sided relationship between humans and the environment, sharpened by the threat of climate change.In a small collection of trees (2024) and when we took the forest apart (for our pleasure) (2025), he builds fictional landscapes from Google Earth imagery, examining the deficiencies of 3D texture mapping and how algorithms attempt to recreate the world.,
When Sontier began exhibiting NFTs, he wrote a public guide encouraging Aotearoa/New Zealand artists toward low-energy blockchains, using the platform Hic et Nunc as a case study.He was a finalist in the 28th Wallace Art Awards in 2019.He later served as one of the curation managers for a Teia-curated exhibition at a Tezos community event in Miami, helping select curators and shape the voting process.
