Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill is an artist who has expanded photography beyond its traditional role as a means of recording the world, exploring instead how images can be made in collaboration with it. In Hackney Flowers, Gill layered photographs taken in Hackney, East London, with flowers and seeds gathered in the same area, even burying the photographs in soil and allowing the processes of place and time to enter the work. For Talking to Ants, he placed plants, insects, and other found materials from the sites he photographed inside his camera, allowing their unintended shadows and traces to settle onto the film alongside the landscape. Please Notify the Sun, meanwhile, was made through an “exploration” in which Gill entered the body of a fish himself. This line of inquiry reaches one of its most distinctive expressions in The Pillar. In a field in Sweden, Gill placed a single wooden post and set up a motion-sensitive camera in front of it. Without being present himself, he recorded the birds that gathered around the post. Wings in motion, moments of rest, birds preening, taking flight. These images are not the result of a photographer waiting for and selecting a decisive moment. They emerged through an encounter between the birds, chance, and the camera itself. Gill gradually relinquishes the photographer’s act of “taking” a photograph, entrusting the work to nature and to chance. Rather than controlling the image, he creates the conditions in which a photograph can come into being. When we encounter Gill’s photographs, our imagination may extend beyond what has been captured, toward the events and passage of time that preceded it.