Ian Charles Stewart

Although I was a mathematician by academic inclination my first love was photography. Some combination of my mother’s fashion magazines and the subscription to to National Geographic Magazine I was offered by my godfather helped generate in me a NEED to create images.  It helped that my father was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and President of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong.  I felt that being a photographer or photojournalist was a WORTHY profession. So whilst I studied computer science and particle physics at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) I spent all my spare time taking photos or processing them in the University dark room.  I worked for local papers and helped student friends who wanted modelling or acting portfolio pix.

Fresh out of university I worked as an assistant to a magazine photographer in Sydney, honing my technical skills, before launching into my first photo book on the People of Indonesia (“Indonesians : Portraits from an Archipelago”) the country of my mother’s birth, and then my second photo book on the shophouse architecture of Singapore (“Pastel Portraits”).   I spent ten years as a professional photographer, working for People Magazine, Vogue Magazine, Flare Magazine, HH The Aga Khan and others before realising that one made more money if you owned the publication.  Off to Business school (IMD in Switzerland) and 5 years working for the Pearson Group (owners of the Financial Times, BSkyB Television, the Economist and other media properties) and Lazard before launching WiReD Magazine with Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe in January 1993.  AZTEC Internet was my next company; we built FT.com, BBC News Online, UpMyStreet.com and other ground breaking UK Internet businesses.  Successful exits turned me into an investor, running a venture capital unit within Rothschild in the UK, and then a social venturer, creating the WheelsPlusWIngs Foundation with Stuart James to help disabled children in China and SE Asia.

I am now based in Switzerland, teaching entrepreneurship (I am am Executive / Entrepreneur in Residence at IMD the business school in Lausanne, Switzerland), investing in tech and media startups, advising CEOs on innovation, coaching volleyball, and making images again.

I can be reached at icspix(at)gmail.com.