Steven Sklifas is an Australian writer, photographer, storyteller, and researcher whose work spans more than two decades of professional photography, independent research, and creative exploration. Through words and images, he documents the histories, landscapes, architecture, cultures, and natural environments that shape our understanding of the world.
His work has taken him extensively across Australia, Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East and the Americas, creating a substantial photographic and written archive encompassing ancient cities and archaeological sites, architecture and cultural heritage, historic towns, gardens, landscapes, wildlife and the natural world.
At the heart of Steven’s practice is an enduring fascination with place. He is interested not simply in what a landscape, monument or ruined city looks like, but in what it remembers: the people who inhabited it, the ideas and beliefs that shaped it, the civilisations that rose and disappeared there, and the traces that remain long after their original world has vanished.
The Mediterranean has occupied a particularly important place in his life and work. Over many years he has explored and photographed its archaeology, architecture and cultural landscapes, travelling through Greece, Italy, Sicily, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Syria, Libya and beyond. His archive ranges from some of antiquity’s most celebrated places to remote archaeological sites and landscapes rarely encountered by the wider travelling public.
Among the most historically significant parts of this archive are photographs created during journeys through Syria and Libya before war and political upheaval transformed many of the places he encountered. He photographed ancient cities, archaeological sites, monuments and landscapes, including places subsequently damaged, altered or made difficult to access. These images have acquired an additional significance with time, preserving visual records of cultural heritage as it appeared during a period that can no longer be recovered.
Ancient Greece remains one of the strongest influences upon Steven’s imagination. Greek history, archaeology, mythology, literature and philosophy have accompanied him throughout much of his life, reinforced by his own Greek heritage and by repeated journeys through the landscapes in which those histories and myths were formed.
Yet his interests extend far beyond antiquity. Architecture, art, literature, and cultural heritage sit alongside gardens, botany, ecology, wildlife, and biodiversity. Increasingly, his work explores the relationship between the human and natural worlds and the responsibility to understand, document, and preserve what has been inherited.
Photography and writing are inseparable within this practice. Steven has worked professionally as a photographer for more than two decades, with experience encompassing architecture, interiors, property, heritage, landscapes, gardens, travel and editorial photography. His photographs have been published and licensed internationally in books, newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, educational publications, and cultural contexts.
His work has appeared through major publishers and institutions, including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Lonely Planet and The Guardian, alongside museums, galleries, academic publications and cultural organisations internationally. Hundreds of his photographs have been published or licensed around the world.
Writing allows Steven to travel beyond the visible surface of an image. His essays and place-based stories weave together history, mythology, landscape, personal experience and observation, often returning to questions that have fascinated him throughout his life: what survives, what disappears, what a place remembers, and what remains when the people who once shaped it are gone.
Ruined cities, ancient sanctuaries, forgotten roads, gardens, forests, mountains, and historic buildings become more than subjects. They become thresholds into other worlds. Through research and imagination, Steven seeks to recover something of the lives, beliefs and landscapes that once existed there, while remaining attentive to what survives in the present: a weathered stone, a fragment of sculpture, the movement of water, a tree growing among ruins, or the changing light across an ancient landscape.
His research has also informed public presentations, including his photographic lecture Photographic Odyssey of the Legacy and Glory of the Ancient Greek and Hellenistic World, which brought together original photography, historical research, and years of travel across the ancient Mediterranean.
Today, Steven continues to develop an independent creative practice that refuses to sit comfortably within a single discipline. Photography leads to history; history leads to landscape; landscape leads to nature; and each new discovery opens another path of enquiry. Archaeology, architecture, gardens, wildlife, literature, mythology, and the environmental world are not separate interests so much as different expressions of the same enduring curiosity.
Underlying this work is a profound sense that the world is both extraordinary and fragile.
The ancient cities that have survived for millennia, the architecture inherited from earlier generations, the forests and landscapes shaped over deep time, the species with which humanity shares the Earth, and the stories carried from one generation to another are all part of an inheritance greater than any single lifetime.
Steven’s work is, in part, an attempt to bear witness to that inheritance.
To photograph a place is to preserve a moment of its existence. To write about it is to follow its story beyond what can be seen. To research it is to listen for the voices that time has almost silenced.
And to wonder is to recognise that none of these things should ever be taken for granted.
For Steven, wonder has always been the beginning: wonder leads to curiosity, curiosity to understanding, understanding to reverence, and reverence ultimately to stewardship.
It is this impulse that continues to draw him towards distant ruins, quiet gardens, old buildings, wild landscapes, and the innumerable stories still waiting to be found.
To look more closely. To understand more deeply.
And, wherever possible, to help preserve something of this remarkable world for those who come after us.