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David Bate is a visual artist and writer based in London, UK. He is widely known for his work in and on photography, art & avant-garde culture.

He was one of the first UK photographic artists to experiment with digital photographic processes and created the innovative series European Letters in 1992 and was commissioned for a sequel work Strangers by Camerawork Gallery in the mid 1990s. The work used the new digital techniques to create a strangeness in the new digital realism and considered relations within the 'new Europe' after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His visual work has an interest in avant-garde and surrealist aesthetics: Zero Culture (2000) was a meditation on culture at the millenial moment; an experimental photo-narrative work; while the series Zone (2001) shot in Estonia in Eastern Europe develops the haunting alterity of Tarkovsky's film Stalker. This work has travelled widely. More recent work Bungled Memories, is a series of beautiful still life pictures about domestic accidents that have occurred in his kitchen, unconscious accidents. Most recently he was Artist-in-Residence in Melbourne, Australia where he shot his new work, set is Australia, about 'globalization' called Australian Picnic. His writings include the two books Photography and Surrealism and Photography: Key Concepts. The series of photographs ZONE and other works are also forthcoming as monographs.