Stephen Gill

Talking to Ants

Stephen Gill likes to test the limits that photography imposes on him. As a conceptual artist – and also a bit of a sociologist and poet – he experiments with various unusual techniques in his documentation of the district of Hackney in East London. Among his working methods were burying photos (Buried), creating lavish collages with flowers and seeds (Hackney Flowers) and placing objects in the camera so that they left their traces on the film, confusing the scale of the images (Talking to Ants). He aimed to encourage the spirit of the place to become trapped in the emulsion like amber, creating a series of surreal interventions in the photographs. He physically inserts bits and pieces of detritus inside the camera body before photographing his local surroundings. Streets, housing estates, markets and canals provide the backdrop for images embedded with various forms of plant life, insects, plastic and even tiny fragments of broken glass from a car headlight. Objects, thus, appear simultaneously both behind and in front of the camera lens, creating curious juxtapositions between surface and reality. As a result, flatness counters depth to disorientate our perception of different pictorial planes. What we get is a multi-layered and heightened sense of place, form and texture that works to harness not just what the area looks like but also how it feels. Gill’s photographs are now held in various private and public collections and were exhibited in different international galleries and museums such as the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Agnès B Collection, etc. Gill had numerous solo exhibitions at festivals such as the Rencontres d’Arles, the Toronto Photography Festival and the PHotoEspaña. In Summer 2013, the Foam Amsterdam dedicated Gill a big retrospective, Best Before End.