Steve Lazarides: Capturing Banksy, One Frame at a Time

Posted by Donna on 18th October, 2025
Filed under: From the Street

Steve Lazarides (born c. 1969) is a British–Greek Cypriot photographer, publisher, collector, and curator who helped propel street and underground art from subculture to the global art stage.

Raised in Bristol amid the youth-club scene of Barton Hill, Lazarides absorbed the energy of graffiti and music before studying photography at Newcastle Polytechnic. In the mid-1990s he began documenting Britain’s subcultures for Sleazenation and The Face, capturing the grit and improvisation of a new visual language.

A 1997 commission to photograph a then-unknown Bristol stencil artist, Banksy, would alter both of their trajectories. Lazarides became Banksy’s driver, photographer, and agent, helping to shape the mythology surrounding his anonymity. If Banksy was the masked provocateur, Lazarides was the quiet architect, bridging the wall and the white cube, the street and the market.

In 2001 he co-founded Pictures on Walls, a print studio that democratised access to street art, followed by his first London gallery in 2006, representing figures such as Invader, JR, and Vhils. “I never fucking wanted to be a gallerist,” he told Dazed & Confused, “I did it to promote a subculture that was being overlooked.”

By 2009, his collaboration with Banksy had ended, an “unexplained” parting after years of intensity and secrecy. Yet Lazarides’ archive, containing over 100,000 photographs (around 12,000 of Banksy), remains one of the most significant visual records of street art’s rise. Through his lens, the ephemeral became enduring, anonymity became iconography.

In recent years, Lazarides has stepped back from gallery life, disillusioned by what he calls the art world’s “snobbery,” and returned to his photographic roots. He continues to re-evaluate his archive, not as memorabilia, but as a living document of a movement that redefined art.