STEPHEN GILL
The Photographers’ Gallery
16 - 18 Ramillies Street
London W1F 7LW
Oxford Circus
tpg.org.uk
Untitled from the series Hackney Flowers 2007, © Stephen Gill courtesy of Christophe Guy Gallery
myeyefellout
STEPHEN GILL: myeyefellout
Drawing together six of his most iconic series’,
and a selection of internationally acclaimed
publications, myeyefellout reflects British
photographer Stephen Gill’s lifelong fascination
with nature and longstanding dialogue with the
London borough of Hackney.
Gill’s distinctive images aim to capture the world
we live in by focusing on and preserving the
seemingly inconspicuous but revealing details
of daily life. From Hackney Flowers (2003-2007)
to his most recent work, Best Before End (2013),
he harnesses a unique visual language by
fusing documentary photography, coincidence,
experiment and intervention.
Hackney’s landscape and its inhabitants have been
a primary focus in his work since the late 1990s
when he started documenting the area through a
series of portraits and studies. For him, ‘straight’
descriptive photography often felt restrictive
and unable to fully support his particular
artistic concerns. Embracing the challenges
imposed by the medium’s technical boundaries, he
began encompassing both its perceived ‘weaknesses’
alongside its illustrative strengths in his approach.
This included experimenting with part-processing
negatives in energy drinks (Best Before End); leaving
photos to decompose in the ground (Buried); utilising
pond water during different stages (Co-existence); and
placing material either in the camera itself (Talking to
Ants) or over his existing images to be rephotographed
(Hackney Flowers). The resulting works offer new
and complex compositions, giving autonomy to the
place or subject, giving space to essential details and
transforming the often austere scenery.

To coincide with the exhibition and as part of the
Gallery Editions scheme, Print Sales is launching an
exclusive special limited edition print from the series
Talking to Ants priced at £400 + VAT. Additional
prints from series presented in the exhibition are
available from £750 + VAT.
STEPHEN GILL
BIOGRAPHY
Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to
his father and interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his
microscope. Gill has emerged as a major force in British photography, his photographic work has been
exhibited and is held in collections at many international galleries and museums including London’s National
Portrait Gallery, Tate, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Somerset House, The Photographers’ Gallery, Victoria
Miro Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts, Leighton House Museum, Haus Der Kunst, Gun Gallery, The Sprengel
Museum and has had solo shows in festivals including - The Toronto photography festival, PHotoEspaña and
Recontres d’Arles.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2015. Stephen Gill, London Chronicles, Pôle Image, Normandy
2015. Buried flowers cosexist with Disappointed ants, Christophe Guye Gallery
2015. Best Before End – GP Gallery, Tokyo
2014. Series Photographs - Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark
2014. Coexistence - Photobook museum, Cologne
2013. Talking to Ants – Shoot Gallery Oslo
2012. Coexistence - Centre national de l’audiovisuel, Luxembourg
2011. Outside In – GP Gallery, Tokyo
2011. Outside In – Gungallery, Stockholm
2010. Coming up for Air – GP Gallery, Tokyo Japan
2010. Outside In - Brighton Photo Bienalle
2009. Hackney Flowers – Gaain Gallery , Korea
2009. Hackney Flowers - G/P Gallery, Tokyo
2008. A Series of Disappointments - Gungallery, Stockholm
2008. New York Photography Festival
2006. Toronto Photography Festival, Canada
2005. Photo Espania: Invisible and Lost
2005. Stephen Gill - The Architectural Association, London
2004. Field Studies - The State Centre of Architecture, Moscow
2004. Recontres d’Arles Photography festival
2003. Hackney Wick - The Photographers’ Gallery, London
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2015. Beneath the Surface, Somerset House from the V&A Museum
2015. Beastly, Winterthur Fotomuseum, Switzerland
2015. British Photography from the 1960’s to Today – Oct Loft, Shenzhen
2015. Hackney Flowers, Fotografia Europea Earth Effect
2014. The Return to Reason, Weny Norris San Francisco
2014. Urban Spirit – Chistophe Guye Gallery, Zurich
2014. Talking to Ants – Bienne Festival of Photography, Zurich
2013. Hackney Wick – Belfast Exposed
2012 Residual Traces, Photofusion, July 2012
2012. Juxtaposition, See Studio, Hackney Wick
2012. Elevator Gallery, Hackney Wick, Retrospex
2012. Et Cetera – Hoxton Art Gallery
2012. Off Ground – Helsinki Photography Festival
2011. Photography Calling ! Sprengel Museum, Hannover,
2010. London Calling, James Hyman Gallery 2009. Britains Rubbish, lets all move to Berlin - Kreuzberg Gallery
2009. After Color - Bose Pacia, New York
2009. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire - Danielle Arnaud Gallery
2008. Borderspaces - Schwartz Gallery, Hackney Wick
2008. What You See Is What You Get, CNA - Luxembourg
2008. Anonymous Origami and Disappointments - St. Ann’s Warehouse, New York
2008. European Eyes on Japan, April - October, Kagoshima Museum of Art
2007. Terrains D’Entente, Paysages Contemporains, Rencontres d’Arles
2007. ‘Says the Junk in the Yard’, Flowers East
2007. Something That I’ll Never Really See, The V & A, London
2007. State of Work, Fotohof Gallery, Salzburg, Austria
2006. Click, Double Click: Haus Der Kunst, Munich
2006. Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London
2005. Noorderlicht Photo Festival 2005, The Netherlands, Traces & Omens
2005. Fotomuseum, Rotterdam: A Gentle Madness, Hackney Wick photographs
2005. Photography 2005 - Victoria Miro Gallery, London
2004. A Gentle Madness, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television
2001. British Artists Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, London
BOOKS BY STEPHEN GILL
2014. Pigeons
2014. Hackney Kisses
2014. Talking to Ants
2014. Best Before End
2012. Coexistence
2011. Off Ground
2010. B Sides
2010. Outside In
2010. Coming up for Air 2009. 44 photographs, Trinidad 2009. The Hackney Rag 2008. Warming Down 2008. A Series of Disappointments 2007. Anonymous Origami 2007. Hackney Flowers 2007. Archaeology in Reverse 2006. Buried 2005. Hackney Wick 2005. Invisible 2004. Field Studies BOOKS EDITED BY STEPHEN GILL
2011. Lets sit down before we go – Bertien Van Manen
2008. Andrei Tarkovsky Bright, bright day
2006. Unseen UK, Photographs by postmen and women
AWARDS
2010. Nobody – Photo Espana Outstanding Publishing House of the Year
2009. A Series of Disappointments, Photo Eye, Best books
2008. Hackney Flowers, Shorlisted in Arles Book Award
2008. Hackney Flowers, Photobook award, Kasseler fotoforum
2008. Anonymous Origami, runner up in Specific Object Award
2008. Anonymous Origami, shortlisted Photo Espania Book award
2008. Hackney Flowers, Photography Book of the year, The Times
2007. Buried, Shorlisted in Arles Book Award
2007. Hackney Wick – Winner of Photo Eye best books
2007. Buried, Photo District News Award, Best Books
2006. Winner of Vic Odden Award
2006. Hackney Wick, Shorlisted in Arles Book Award
2006. Invisible, Photo District News Award, Best Books
2005. Invisible, Shorlisted in Arles Book Award
2004. Field Studies, Photo District News Award, Best Books
2004. Winner of John Kobal Book Award for “A book of Field Studies”
2003. Field Studies, Shorlisted in Arles Book Award
2002. John Kobal 10th Anniversary, National Portrait Gallery
2001. John Kobal Portrait Award
1997. World Press Master Class, The Netherlands
1996. John Kobal Portrait Award
1996. Ernst Haas Golden Light Award, USA
1986. Kodak Pet Portrait Award
1997. World Press Master Class, The Netherlands
1996. John Kobal Portrait Award
1996. Ernst Haas Golden Light Award, USA
1986. Kodak Pet Portrait Award
SELECTED WRITING AND INTERVIEWS
2015. Photo News – Talking to Ants
2014. Harmony, Chaos and Confusion - The Eyes
2013. Not in Service – Iain Sinclair
2014. Photobook Bristol interview with Stephen Gill
2012. 9-Day Dig – AMC2
2012. The Wonderful World of Stephen Gill - BJP
2012. Outside In – foam Magazine
2012. Interview – Blink Magazine
2012. Unpublished Hackney Flowers – Huge Magazine
2011. The World Inside a Camera – The Morning News
2011. Hackney Calling - Monopol
2011. Self Publishing Done Right – PDN
2010. Stephen Gill’s Best Shot – The Guardian
2010. The Devil in the Detail – The Telegraph Magazine
2009. The Hackney Citizen - The Wicker Man, Sarah Birch
2009. Shigeo Goto, The hope of photography
2009. Suwako Fukai - Quotation Magazine
2008. Most Influential in Book publishing, PDN
2008. Angharad Lewis, Lost forever, Grafik
2008. Toyoko Ito, Interview, Studio Voice, Japan
2008. Japan Esquire, Hackney Flowers
2007. Christof Schaden, Invariably Eden - foam Magaine
2007. Geoff Dyer - Unseen UK review / Aperture Magazine
2007. Times Photography Book of the year
2007. Anthony Lasala - Buried, Photo Eye Magazine
2007. Jeong Eun Kim - Fragments of a poem, Iann Magazine
2006. Gerry Badger -, Hackney Wick, Ag Magazine
2006. MH - Hackney Wick, Foto8 Magazine
2006. Iain Sinclair - Lost Treasure, The Guardian Weekend
2005. Sophie Malexis, Hommes Invisibles, Le Monde 2
2005. Michel Guerrin, Le photographe en anthropolgue de la ville, Le Monde
2005. Photonews, Invisible
2005. Tim Clark - PhotoEspaña, NextLevel Magazine: Issue #8
2005. Now you see them, The Guardian Weekend
2004. A keen observer of life, Creative Review
2004. The Kindness of Strangers, The Guardian Weekend
2004. Message au dos, Liberation newspaper
2004. Jane Fletcher - A book of field studies, Source Magazine
2003. Sarah Kent, Hackney Wick - Time Out
2003. Elaine Paterson - Straight out of the ordinary, Metro Newspaper
2003. Paul Wombell - Eye Catching, Design Week
2003. Martin Murray, The Wick, Source Magazine
2001. Thomas Sutcliffe, Framed - The Independent Magazine
PRESS
THE GUARDIAN
15 Jun 2014
A few years ago I was walking with a friend in some fields on the southwest coast of Rousay,
one of the northern isles of Orkney. There were a fair amount of cattle about, but we weren’t
paying much attention to them and nor were they to us. True, one beast did look significantly
bigger than the others, and I said to my friend, Oh, d’you think that might be a bull? at the
exact moment that this rather larger kine lurched into trot and began heading our way. My
friend – whose guiding spiritual principle derives from a koan given to him by sadhu he
found sitting cross-legged at the source of the Ganges when he was a young man – cannot
bear witness to a physical challenge without immediately responding to it: if he notes that a
cliff might be tricky to scale – he scales it; if he supposes that current might be treacherous
to navigate – he strips and breasts it. Anyway, as the beast – which I could now see was
conspicuously horned – came barrelling towards me, I realised that my dharma buddy was
already fifty metres away and on the far side of a triple-stranded barbed wire fence; I reiterated:
D’you think it might be a bull? And he shouted back, Of course it’s a bull – look at its bloody
great balls!
I retail this anecdote in a spirit of unabashed nostalgia – there’s really something
rather marvellous about being pursued across a field by a charging bull, even if at the far side
you rip the crotch of your trousers to shreds on a fence. The experience puts you on a footing
with all those finely cross-hatched figures doing similarly stereotypic rural things – spooning
on haystacks, caught in mantraps – that I recall from the ancient back numbers of Punch
magazines I used to read in dentists’ waiting rooms. Now, of course, these are gone – the
magazines, and the free dentistry – and for the most part you don’t see bulls in fields at all.
I don’t know where they keep bulls when they’re not ‘servicing’ cows, but given our current
mores it’s probably in a scrubbed and antiseptic barn unit, where they’re shown beefcake
pornography and fed energy supplements so as to excite them to the correct pitch. Meanwhile,
I’m still impotently out in the fields, where trudging across them I’ll often come across their
contemporary incarnation: an empty Red Bull can.
True, the first time I came across a can that had once contained the energy drink in a
field I didn’t run away from it and leap a barbed wire fence – but I felt quite like doing exactly
that. The absurdity of the Red Bull can in the field operated at so many different levels that
I got into something that used to be described in the pages of Punch (when it was subtitled
‘The London Charivari’) as ‘a tizzy’. Obviously I experienced a semantic destabilisation:
an assault on the mimetic function of language – really ‘a red bull’ should refer to a …red
bull – that recalled to my mind the conflicts between the Vienna Circle and Ordinary Language
philosophers. What, I wondered, can we understand by the words ‘red bull’ in this day an
age? Presumably only an evilly-chemical-smelling orangey gloop that’s served mixed with
vodka in downmarket pubs and clubs, inducing in its drinkers the reversal of Elvis Costello’s
trope, so that they can’t fall down for standing up. Then there was the context: the British
countryside may have largely been reduced to a mono-cultural desert of agribusiness, but for
that our uchronic vision of it persists: we expect to find Rosie with some sharp cider under the
haystack, not a roseate energy drink. And lastly there was my own very personal discomfort: as
a person who has functioned within a framework of artificially-induced stimulus and sedation
for my entire adult life, I took the Red Bull can as personal bottle bearing a simple message:
emptiness.
TIREDNESS CAN KILL read large signs placed the length and breadth of our
motorway network, TAKE A BREAK. But I never do – in the very old days I’d eat a screw of
cigarette paper with some amphetamine sulphate in it when I felt on the point of falling asleep
at the wheel; or I’d drop a dexy or a blue, or – if I was particularly fortunate – a black bomber
(time-released Dextroamphetamine, the Rolls Royce of stimulant drugs). SPEED KILLS is
another well known motorway exhortation, but this seems to directly contradict the stuff about
tiredness. That’s the trouble with our society: it doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going,
arriving in hynopompic splendour, or departing in a dusty puff of benzodiazepines. Since the
First World War there’s been a largely tolerant attitude towards stimulants – true, once their use
becomes egregious they tend to be proscribed by the state, but once a war starts they’re a drug
on the market. The trouble is that for some people the condition of late capitalism is itself a
permanent fight for existence, and so ever since Coca-Cola was first marketed with the slightest
tincture of cocaine hydrochloride, there’s been a healthy appetite for watered-down uppers.
I stopped taking speed in the 1980s, around the time that energy drinks began
appearing – and the two phenomena were not entirely unrelated. There was a little hole-inthe-wall worker’s café near my then office that served something called ‘Jolt Cola’. This didn’t
have guarana, ginseng, vitamin B3, taurine, inositol or glucuranolactone in it – the active
ingredients of today’s boosters; rather it was simply billed as having ‘four times as much
caffeine as a standard cola’. I lapped the sugary stuff up – I was doing a lot of driving at the
time, about 30,000 miles a year for work, and I needed very frequent Jolts if I was to stay
awake enough to read all those motorway signs. Then a couple of years later I met a fellow who
has the UK concession to flog something called Gusto! (yes, the exclamation was part of the
branding), which haled from the Amazon, and came with some blether about ‘ancient herbal
stimulant root’ on its grubby little label. I laid the stuff down by the case – the way Rothschilds
presumably lay down Mouton Rothschild.
And so it went on: in lock-step with the zeitgeist, throughout the nineties and the
noughties I drank more and more energy drinks, until like the wider world around me I was
super-saturated with the drek. Of course, I’d long since speed-read numerous consumer articles
on them that told me what I intuitively knew: that the claims for all their magical ingredients
were largely either bunk or unproven, and that what was really giving me wings – horrid little
leathery diabolic ones in my case – were those stalwart stimulants caffeine and sugar. There
seemed a nice traditional flavour to this information: the material assemblage within which
Western European global economic hegemony was created was, after all, spun from sugar,
ground from coffee, infused by tea, and powered by slavery. Now the perpetuation of wageslavery was being engineered by the endless repackaging of just these same ingredients. I gave
up the energy drinks and increased my already nerve-jangling consumption of sweet espresso.
Tiredness can indeed kill – but then what’s death if not a big Chandleresque sleep,
in which wiseacre gumshoes drive to the end of the night only to discover that it’s their own
involvement in the case that led to the murder-spree. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, for all sleep is
the sleep of reason – we need our wits about us: it’s an accelerated world out there, demanding
split-second decision making capability to hit the right button so as to make the right multimillion dollar trade, or order the next pizza, or download the next app. We swim through an
orangey brinelight: a carbonated energy field of unified, fizzing awareness; it’s dreamlike this
existence – most certainly – but it’s a waking dream, and for that we have energy drinks to
thank. Not for us the kava-induced anaesthesia of the Polynesian, or the opiated torpor of the
South Asian – true, we are fond of a voddie or nine, but we know how to handle our liquor,
with the emphasis being on ‘handle’. We grip things hard, the tension of our bodies seemingly
in direct contradiction to the insubstantiality of our environment – we go for the burn, while
everything around us is liquefying.
Stephen Gill’s beautiful images, which incorporate energy drinks as an integral
part of their processing, capture this strange state of being – at once driven and aqueous,
simultaneously sweet and oh so bitter. The Best Before End series, memorialises the
freewheeling Decline of the West; which, to paraphrase Alfred Jarry, the founding father of
pataphysics, is best conceived of as a downhill bicycle race sponsored by a major-brand energy
drink, in which all of the pursuit riders have the red head of the Minotaur. For myself, I’m way
out in front of them – and pedalling HARD.
PRESS
THE GUARDIAN
03 Mar 2010
For quite a few years I’ve been making photographic work in the London borough of
Hackney, where I live. Recently, I’ve been trying to photograph not just what the place looks
like, but also trying to include as much as I can of what it feels like. I started collecting little
bits of stuff from actual places, and then putting them inside the camera. Bits of plant life,
seeds, or glass: I drop them in just before loading the film. I’ve even used insects. These
objects then sit on the film emulsion when I’m taking the picture. It’s a way of encompassing
the actual essence of a place in an image, the visual noise and chaos. I did think about
photographing these tiny objects directly, but I didn’t have a macro lens.
The background picture is just a random street in Hackney. I used to take descriptive,
detached pictures of the area, but then I thought: why not go one step further? This way, I
have slightly less control and have to grapple with the point where intention meets chance. I
buried prints in the ground, leaving them for a while and then digging them up. It is exciting,
knowing you are working half-blind; you have no idea what the pictures will look like.
This series is in the same vein; until you process the film, you have no idea where the objects
will fall. The green blobs down the left-hand side are a tiny bit of silica gel I found in the
gutter; the cloudy things on the top left are tiny bits of glass, probably from a car headlight. I
developed it completely straight, with no computer enhancement. Each frame is from exactly
what’s sitting on the negative.
I starting making these photographs a couple of years ago, and I’ve done hundreds now.
Hackney is a place that attracts obsessives. It’s something to do with its contradictions: you
can be in a beautiful spot with canals and meadows, and then the flipside is chaos and dirt.
That’s what I’m trying to grapple with. Photography is good at turning things inside out,
and this is the opposite: bringing the outside in. As much as I love photography, part of me is
rebelling against it.
CV
Born: Bristol, 1971.
Studied: No formal training.
Inspirations: “Chilean Sergio Larrain, for the way he gives a heightened sense of place, form
and texture. France’s Eugène Atget, too.”
High point: “Having the freedom to work almost every day on personal projects. I’m very
lucky to be able to do that.”
Pet hate: “Pressure to make work to fulfil an audience’s appetite.”
PRESS
PHOTOMONITOR
01 Nov 2013
Elisa Badii / Stephen Gill: Anonymous Portraits
November 2013
Stephen Gill’s eclectic vision defines an approach to the medium of photography
that is strikingly personal. I asked Stephen to talk with me about four series that caught
my attention for the peculiarity of their imagery: Off Ground, A Series of Disappointments,
Anonymous Origami and Russian Women Smokers. They all revealed some common traits and
analogies that I was interested in discussing further with him.
An attentive observation of the formal qualities of these bodies of work allows for a
deeper understanding of Stephen Gill’s experimental line of research. Although these images
don’t fall into classic portraiture, they represent to me Gill’s personal reflection on the genre.
I would describe them as “anonymous portraits”.
Stephen and I started off our conversation with Off Ground: a series that he created
as a response to the riots in the North-East London borough of Hackney in 2011. Gill set
out to find the most appropriate way to photographically render the current events without
disrespectfully adding chaos to the already delicate and unstable social balance. He didn’t
want to amplify the clamour that was already spreading all over the news across the country.
Off Ground sheds the background noise and the speculations to focus on specific
and symbolically relevant objects. As well as A Series of Disappointments, Off Ground sees
Gill modify his mind set and modus operandi: the preparatory stage is here as important as
the shooting itself. Rather than leaving the studio to take pictures, this time Gill went off in
search of elements – or better: clues – that could help him document the story he wanted
to tell. He chose to use stones and rocks as subjects that could convey both the sense of the
heaviness of the material and the lightness of an object that can fly through the air.
The stones stand here for those who participated in the riots: they are transfigured
symbols of the rage and the mischief that each of them deliberately freed in a moment of
“collective release”. Photographing rocks instead of people allows Gill to avoid feeding
the infamous vicious circle of media communication that turns right to information into
obsessive curiosity of the public, and violent rebels into revolutionary heroes.
The physicality of the objects portrayed by Gill is fundamental. The rocks appear as
if they were directly affected by the experience: their shape is defined by the way they landed
on the ground, as much as by the mental state of the person that collected and threw them
in the air. The act of launching the rocks can be seen as a metaphorical action through which
the individuals let go of their emotional baggage, transferring it onto the stone. Each portrait
is heavily charged and holds in itself a memory of the episode.
Another example of “people-less portraits” is A Series of Disappointments that reveals
its duplicity already in the title with a “jeu de mots” that plays with the content. The term
series can here both be read as sequence of disappointments and body of work about
disappointments. Each betting slip represents a promise that, in most cases, will end up being
only a mere sign of defeat, grief and loss.
To much surprise of the personnel and the attendants, Gill spent a considerable
amount of time walking around Hackney to collect hundreds of slips inside and around
the local betting shops. In this borough, the gambling business represents a worrying
phenomenon: there are in fact about seventy-one shops while the average number in the
other neighbourhoods is only twenty-three. A Series of Disappointments is a protest against
the uncontrolled proliferation of betting shops that has become a real issue in an area that is
trying “to shake off its bad reputation”.
Each betting slip has a very strong aesthetic and sculptural identity that is probably
the most interesting aspect of these “anonymous portraits”. They all assume various and
articulated shapes that seem to reflect the personality and the ability to express feelings of the
people that moulded them into crystallised sculptures of their emotional state. Every portrait
is unique and is the proof of the different ways we elaborate our own drama. The shape that
the slips ended up taking mirrors the person that created them.
Gill compares the action of collecting tiny bits of evidence—whether betting slips, or
rocks—to forensic research. Once gathered, the selected pieces are then carefully brought to
his studio where they are analysed and photographed.
A step further in this journey inside Stephen Gill’s personal take on portraiture is
Anonymous Origami: a series that depicts folded toilet paper. Gill started work on this project
in a period of his life when he was constantly traveling and was forced to live out of a suitcase
in hotel rooms. This work sets itself apart from the previous two series for the total lack of
emotions. Anonymous Origami is not only a celebration of perfection and functionality but
also an acknowledgment of the dedication of those “invisible people” who silently work to
reach the highest level of quality.
In Anonymous Origami there is no direct relationship between the person who
manually pleated the toilet paper and the shape that it assumed. The delicate beauty of
these images is emotion-less. They are the product of a mechanical action but they are,
nevertheless, able to express the care of the individual who performed it.
The last group of “anonymous portraits” is Russian Women Smokers. This time in colour,
Stephen Gill, true to his forensic research, investigates and collects discarded cigarettes found
on the streets of St. Petersburg in Russia. There is nothing to note here other than the lipstick
marks at the end of the butts. It is these random red and orange traces that reveal the identity
of the smokers. They open a door onto the possibility of a psychological study, and offer a
rare glimpse on these women’s stories and private tensions.
A portrait doesn’t necessarily need to include people’s faces or bodies for Gill. The
replacement of their physical features with icons or symbols of their presence is as valuable a
way to execute portraiture as the traditional method.
Stephen Gill steps back and looks at things from an alternative point of view that is definitely
his own.
– text by Elisa Badii
PRESS
THE TELEGRAPH
14 Jun 2010
The morning I meet the photographer Stephen Gill, in his studio in an old warehouse in
Bethnal Green, east London, with its urban view of tangled railway lines and, in the distance,
the shiny towers of Canary Wharf, he has already been out with his camera since 7am. He
was on the hunt for a tawny owl and her owlets, which he had spied a few days earlier in a
north London park.
Discarded betting slips from Stephen Gill’s book A Series of Disappointments
‘You just have to really stare into the top branches and you see these balls of fluff; they are
really camouflaged,’ he says. ‘I’m always aware nothing happens twice. I checked the BBC
weather and went back, half knowing they wouldn’t be there, but I like that idea of going
there just to find out if they will be sitting in those branches again. Photography is so often
about the pictures you don’t take as the ones you do.’
But he was lucky. The birds were there. ‘Really healthy-looking babies – apparently they are
nesting there but hunting at Hackney Marshes. There is so much construction and so many
more rats there than ever. I see so many, just from the corner of my eye. Occasionally one
runs across your path.’
Gill has been photographing birds, insects and other wildlife since he was a child, when he
would go to the library to renew the same book for months on end. The Observer’s Book of
Pond Life was a great source of inspiration to him. His current bird project has been a work
in progress since 2005. ‘I only just recently brought it back to life again,’ he says. ‘It’s purely
birds in towns and cities. I felt there were a couple of gaps; I really wanted to catch a green
woodpecker I’d seen in Hackney Marshes.’
He opens a box of prints and shows me the work so far – different birds in different urban
locations. I struggle to see the subject of one picture for some time and eventually focus on
the tiny blue tit perched in a tree. I feel as though I need binoculars to see it.
‘It’s a body of work about birds, but it actually doesn’t tell you anything about birds,’ he says.
‘It tells you more about people, it’s just that the bird happens to be in there somewhere.’ He
once photographed a wren that got so lost in the image even he couldn’t remember where it
was perched.
Gill’s photographs can sometimes be apparently of nothing in particular. ‘I’ve taught myself
to really step back and have that equal treatment of things,’ he says. ‘I know that while
photography is often seen as the amplification of something, it is also good at doing the
opposite, quietening things and not enhancing them, and then perhaps you want to look at
the picture, or study it, more.’
Gill was born in Bristol in 1971. His father was – and still is – a keen photographer and
taught Gill to develop and print his own pictures in the darkroom in their attic. While still at
school he went to work for a local photographer, and in 1992 he enrolled in the photography
foundation course at Filton College in Bristol. He then went to work at the photo agency
Magnum in London, first as an intern and then full-time.
‘I was particularly interested in documentary photography,’ he says. ‘My knowledge of
photography and history improved massively there.’ All the time he was at Magnum, he was
doing his own photography in the evenings and weekends. In 1997 he left to go freelance and
worked on commissions to shoot portraits for newspaper supplements, which paid the rent
while he continued with his own projects.
Gill’s natural hunting ground has been Hackney in east London, particularly Hackney
Wick, the area now being radically transformed for the Olympics. His first exhibition, at
the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2005, was of the thriving illegal market that had
grown up on an old dog racing track near Hackney Marshes. He bought a basic fixed-focus
camera there for 50p, and began to photograph the people and the stuff that piled up there
every weekend. He documented the mountains of fridges for sale, stacks of old television sets,
secondhand shoes, people painstakingly sifting through piles of what, on the surface at least,
looks like rubbish.
Other projects have included the backs of advertising billboards, cinema audiences (which led
to a commission for an advertising job from McDonald’s that he turned down, feeling it was
at odds with the nature of his work), shopping trolleys and, always, an ongoing fascination
with nature – trees, insects, swans.
These days, Gill’s photographs are critically acclaimed and internationally exhibited
from the National Portrait Gallery to the Toronto Photography Festival. But he is not
interested in the high-profile commercial avenues open to him, preferring to continue
channelling all his energies into his personal work.
His only source of income comes from the occasional editorial commission, print sales and the
books he publishes through his own imprint, Nobody, which he started in 2005. His website
has become the key to his self-sufficiency. After the Haiti earthquake in January, he produced
100 prints from his Hackney Flowers series (a continuation of the Hackney Wick pictures) to
raise money for the victims; within 15 hours of appearing on the website they had sold out. ‘I
could have sold 400 easily,’ he says. ‘A great reminder of the power of photography.’
Nobody Books is a way of controlling the making and distribution of his own photography
books. Gill is supported in this by the publisher Archive of Modern Conflict, which has been
collecting his work since his Hackney Wick show. It collects his prints as well as documenting
and archiving every part of the process of the book-making, including maquettes and related
artwork. Having such a voracious collector helps Gill fund the books.
One of Gill’s most complicated books was 44 Photographs – Trinidad, published last year. The
entire book was manufactured and assembled by hand over a period of four weeks by a small
production line of friends in his studio. The edition of 115 copies involved Gill and his team
deconstructing a stack of vintage 1964 paperbacks he had found and hand-writing the title
page, as well as several other individual processes including letter-pressing and assembling the
photographic prints into handmade pockets within the book. It is a work of art in itself.
A Series of Disappointments, his collection of photographs of betting slips discarded in bookies
in Hackney, is printed in concertina form on heavy recycled paper. Simply remove the book
block from the cover, unfold it and hang it from nails using the holes punched into the top of
each page, and it becomes your own personal exhibition.
‘I love the idea that the actual shell of a book can really be at one with the content,’ Gill
says. ‘Books are for your hands as well as your eyes and it is so nice to think about texture
and paper and inks and subject and the pace of the book. Our minds are often so geared
to computers and machines that I’ve always tried to hang on to the handmade touches. It’s
actually not that hard; we forget it’s possible to do things by hand in volume.’
While Gill makes his books to be the best possible environment in which to show his
photographs, rather than something that will have commercial appeal, they have become
highly collectable. The special editions usually sell out quickly. Each one is made as a
continuation of the photographic project itself and involves multiple hand processes,
including lino-cut printing, spray paint and rubber stamps – books such as his 2006 edition
of 750 copies of Buried, whose photographs were buried in Hackney Marshes for periods
of time, including one additional print to bury yourself, which is no longer available. As I
write, there is one on eBay priced £150. It cost £40 when it was published. A special-edition
cloth-bound copy of Archaeology in Reverse, a series of photographs of the Olympic site just
as the construction work was beginning, which was published in a small run of 100 and sold
originally for £250, is on sale for £329.
Gill’s latest book, Coming up for Air, is published on July 1. Between 2008 and
2009, he spent two years travelling the length and breadth of Japan, visiting more than 30
aquariums. As in the bird series, the fish are almost incidental. The photographs – sometimes
blurred, abstract and filled with flash – leave you feeling slightly uncomfortable; damp,
claustrophobic and a little disorientated. ‘There is hardly a fish in the book, but it is still a
very aquatic series,’ he explains. ‘I knew deep down, even though these aquariums were my
destinations, most of these pictures would be made on my way to these places, in car-parks or
cafes.’
He is interested in how places function, how the tanks are cleaned, the air pumps,
the workings behind the fish tanks. And as is always the way with Gill, he became so fixated
on his subject matter that he began to see sealife in everything, from bits of machinery and
sections of frozen scaffolding, to everyday umbrellas in the rain. Timothy Prus, who runs
the Archive of Modern Conflict, says, ‘Coming up for Air really marks a turning point for
Stephen. He’s really raised the bar with it. This is by far the best, but you expect really good
stuff to start coming now he is in his late thirties.’
Prus says Gill is trying to make his work quieter and quieter. ‘It’s about a lot of things.
It’s about our human condition as if we were fish in a Japanese aquarium. He is relating the
condition of fish to a world outside the glass they know nothing about. It’s a funny feeling
looking at the pictures as if you are stuck on the other side of the page. There are a whole
load of underlying issues. On another level, it’s quite a jolly book about a romp through
Japanese aquariums.’ Prus says that Gill has dedicated two special editions of his book to his
veteran 20-year-old goldfish, Chippy, who is also given an acknowledgement in the book.
Coming up for Air is the result of a long process of editing, printing, choosing papers
and cloth bindings, finding the right printer (Gill chose one in Belgium), as well as the right
material for the dust jacket.
In a final flourish, Gill spent two weeks in a warehouse at the printers, handpainting swirls
on to each of the 4,500 dust jackets. He even made an intricate etching that he was going
to use for the end papers but decided to keep for the companion book to be published in
November, B-Sides. ‘There are a lot of repetitions – weirdly it’s quite a nice way to finish a
project,’ he says. ‘It’s been such an intense project that the swirls are a very nice feeling of
completely bringing something to an end.’
‘Coming up for Air’ by Stephen Gill, published by Nobody, £36. A signed and numbered
limited edition of 100 copies with a C-type print and case is available from nobodybooks.com
PRESS
LENS CULTURE
14 Jun 2010
Stephen Gill seems like one of the happiest adventurers out in the world playing
with photography today. Still at a young age, he has already written and edited awardwinning books. He’s had great commercial success, lots of exposure, international shows,
and always seems to be doing something new and exciting and — different.
One of Gill’s latest projects follows on earlier work from Hackney Wick (where he
photographed fly-by-night flea market vendors and hangers-on in an abandoned field on
the outskirts of London using a plastic camera). He then took some of those photos and
artfully arranged flower petals and the like on top of the prints, and re-photographed
that work with stunning effect. With Buried he embraces whimsy and chance in a new
way.
“The Photographs in this book were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried
there. The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the
amount of rainfall…“Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up
introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of
letting go and collaborating with place — allowing it also to work in putting the finishing
touches to a picture — felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.”
There is also fun in the packaging of this limited edition artist’s book. As the
bookseller at the Photographer’s Gallery in London was ringing up my purchase, he said
with pleasure and admiration, “Look at that cover! That’s proper Hackney mud smeared
all over it by hand.” An earthy touch, no? Included with each book is an original C-print
with the encouragement to “Bury your own!”The philosophical reveries inspired by
this bit of fun begin to pose some very real and serious questions about the nature of
photography, the object-quality of prints and books, and a way to make each part of a
multiple series unique in its own right. Alec Soth mused about Gill’s latest work:
“One of my frustrations with contemporary photographic technique, mine
included, is the feeling of sterility. Digital processes have become so sophisticated that
nearly every picture you see is dusted and anti-scratched to a state of frozen perfection.
After awhile it all feels so airless.
“So it was with pleasure that I observed evidence of a return to tactile
photography at the recent Photo London exhibition. While I’m not sure I even
noticed Gill’s imagery, it felt good to experience a contemporary photograph that was
overwhelmingly tactile.”
PRESS
THE TELEGRAPH
14 Feb 2015
Stephen Gill’s oblique take on the local urban landscape has fascinated
photography fans across the world. His latest books, bearing similar covers and published
contemporaneously, treat very different topics yet are linked through reliance on
happenstance.
Hackney Kisses is a collection of photographs printed from 1950s negatives Gill
bought on eBay. The actual taker of this collection of wedding pics remains unknown, but
their theme is one of universal relevance.
Even the camera-shy can rarely avoid being snapped on their wedding day, and
matrimonial shots virtually all involve at least one kiss. Most of these images follow
convention: there is a multi-tiered cake standing at attention next to the happy couple,
who are attired in the classic wedding gear of the time: a dark suit and slicked-back hair
for him, lots of white lace for her. Some kisses are overtly lustful; others are nervous pecks
for the camera. All are romantic.
Writes Timothy Prus of this collection: “Kissing can be quite like the reveries in a beautiful
forest, it can also be end-of-pier theatre. Our Master of the Hackney Kisses knows how these
traits combine.”
By contrast, Pigeons takes as its object one of the most unromantic topics imaginable.
The collection features dead pigeons, flying pigeons, nesting pigeons, pigeons out of focus,
pigeons sheltering under bridges, fornicating pigeons and decaying pigeon body parts.
Though the birds inhabit a world made by us, we don’t normally notice them. They are also a
less-than-endearing bird, and these photos do not seek to change that.
The images have been taken by a camera placed atop a pole, thrust up into the dark
underbellies of bridges. The result of this process has a random element to it, and it also
yields a completely deadpan muck-and-all survey of the species in its near-monochrome
habitat.
An introduction by Will Self provides an evocative reflection on the place of pigeons in
London culture past and present. He concludes by noting that “Stephen Gill’s photographs
are devoid of sentiment or affectation – rather than showing the pigeon in our world, they
take us into theirs.”
The pair of books reflect two of Stephen Gill’s long-established passions – Hackney and
birds. What the volumes share is a formal structure of repetition on a theme. Another less
obvious commonality is the element of chance that was involved in their making; both
collections are, in their different ways, the products of what might be called stochastic
photography. They are thus fitting pictorial archaeologies of the local imaginary, sampling
bits of Hackney life from marital rapture to pullastrine domesticity.