Stephen Gill

Photographing Hackney — Building a Method from a Familiar Place

Gill’s interest in photography grew from the quiet influence of his father and from observing insects, birds, and small pond organisms from an early age. His official biography connects these interests to his later image-making and describes photography as a means of responding to his surroundings and to subjects that attract his attention^*1. The same biography explains his later move toward giving part of the process to chance and to the agency of the subject as a way to address sensations and ideas that clear description alone could not hold.

For Hackney Wick, Gill used an inexpensive camera bought at a flea market to photograph everyday life in the area before redevelopment. In an interview with Elephant, he recalls wanting to dismantle some of the photographic knowledge he had already acquired so that the subject could come forward^*3. This establishes a recurring tendency to change photographic rules according to the place instead of treating technical polish as a fixed goal.

From the Appearance of Hackney to Contact with Place

Gill’s work in Hackney moved from observing people and buildings to bringing plants, soil, insects, and discarded materials from the same area into the making process. In an interview with 1854 Photography, he recalls photographing insects, birds, and plants as well as people in East London, taking some home for collage, and describes gathering fragments of landscape as a way to extract “what a place feels like”^*4. From this perspective, the experiments beginning with Buried extend documentary by adding contact, collection, and duration to visual information.

Arnolfini’s retrospective Coming up for Air presented his urban observations alongside later works shaped by nature and chance as parts of one long practice^*2. In a retrospective interview with 1854, Gill similarly speaks of “unlearning” photographic conventions while exploring relations with nature and memory^*4.

Buried — Giving the Photograph Back to the Soil

Buried involved burying prints made in Hackney Wick back in the same ground and digging them up later. LensCulture describes how burial times varied with rain and soil conditions, allowing stains, scratches, and corrosion to enter the image in a collaboration with place^*7. The photograph records the land from outside while also becoming an object physically altered by contact with it.

Soil moisture, microorganisms, and the deterioration of paper determine part of the final image, deliberately narrowing what Gill can predict and making chance a condition of production. Blind Magazine’s description of the retrospective through “camera, process, action” reflects the way post-exposure physical processes remain part of the photographic act in Gill’s work^*18.

Hackney Flowers — Layering Local Plants onto the Image

Hackney Flowers involved placing flowers, seeds, leaves, and other material collected in Hackney directly on photographs and rephotographing them. Nobody Books describes the project, which also included burying some photographs, as a book in which the material of the place enters the photographic surface^*6. Plants appear both as subjects in the landscape and as physical material covering the print.

The Image Museum’s photobook description shows urban photographs intersecting with layers of vegetation across the pages, turning the record of place into collage and material trace^*13. Hackney is thereby represented as an environment that includes small materials gathered from the ground as well as streets and buildings.

Talking to Ants and Coexistence — Opening Camera and Water to the Environment

In Talking to Ants, Gill placed plants, seeds, insects, and other material gathered at the site inside the camera, layering the lens image with shadows and blur created by objects within the camera body. Having observed human life, architecture, and local ecologies coexisting within the same narrow areas of East London, he let fragments of place act on the image from both in front of and behind the lens. Art UK presents the method as part of his long-term interest in drawing surrounding nature into the photographic process^*16.

This idea also developed in Coexistence, made in a former steel-producing area of Luxembourg^*3. Bringing waterside microorganisms and industrial traces close to the photographic process treats environmental history as layers in which people, industry, water, and organisms have coexisted. Gill’s experiments allow soil, microorganisms, water, and living things to participate in the making of the image.

Nobody Books — Making the Photobook as the Work’s Final Form

Gill founded the publishing imprint Nobody Books in 2005 and has continued to publish his own photobooks. The official site presents Hackney Wick, Hackney Flowers, Buried, Coexistence, The Pillar, and other projects as one sustained publishing activity^*5. This gives him control over sequence, paper, format, printing, and binding as one continuous part of making the work.

An interview in Granta emphasizes the book as a major viewing environment in Gill’s work^*10. In projects where prints are buried in soil, even the printed reproduction of scratches and discoloration becomes meaningful. The photobook reconstructs both photography and material experiment in the reader’s hands.

The Pillar — Giving the Shutter to the Birds

After moving to Sweden, Gill made The Pillar by erecting a post in open land and placing a motion-sensor camera opposite it. He recalls setting only the positions of the post and camera so that the birds would take over the making of the frame^*4. His childhood observation of living things, his collection of urban nature in London, and automated observation of birds converge here. Gill designs the background and the positions of the post and camera, while the birds determine when the shutter fires and how their bodies appear. The unpredictability of each frame becomes part of the subject.

1000 Words discusses how the simple apparatus of post and sensor allows the birds’ unpredictable movements to generate the series^*9. 1854 likewise describes the book as the result of a long period of automated photography^*11. In an essay published in The New Yorker, Karl Ove Knausgaard notes how surrendering the shutter moment to an automatic device reduces the tendency to stage birds as human symbols^*12.

From Cheap Cameras to Automated Photography — Choosing Equipment for Each Project

Gill chooses equipment anew for each series, using the apparatus itself as a way of making contact with place. In Hackney he used inexpensive cameras; elsewhere he chose large format, in-camera collage, or automated photography. The biography and project texts at Christophe Guye Galerie show these different devices coexisting across work that ranges from urban observation to projects mediated by nature^*15.

The retrospective catalogue Coming Up for Air, carried by Shashasha, likewise presents changes of method as part of Gill’s work^*14. He changes the photographic mechanism according to how a place needs to be recorded. This is why his work can be read as documentary photography continually adapting its method to the subject.

How Site-Specificity Survives Highly Visible Procedures

Burying prints, placing plants on photographs, or putting insects inside a camera can sound like conceptual devices when described in isolation. PhotoMonitor’s review of The Pillar emphasizes sequence and the specific changes from image to image, a reminder that Gill’s work depends on more than the novelty of its procedures^*17. Even with the same apparatus, what appears and what traces remain vary from place to place.

The Elephant interview repeatedly returns to Gill’s desire to give the subject more agency instead of foregrounding his own photographic knowledge^*3. The experiments therefore work by deliberately narrowing the range of outcomes the author can control.

After Buried — Bringing Material and Chance into Documentary

Gill’s work can be read as a gradual expansion of what counts as a “record of place.” Soil stains, plant shadows, foreign matter inside the camera, and birds triggering sensors all serve as traces of the site participating in the photograph’s physical production. The Museum für Photographie Braunschweig’s decision to place early documentary work and later experiments within one retrospective reinforces this continuity^*8.

Across the Arnolfini retrospective and the official biography, Gill’s subjects change substantially, from urban life in Hackney to birds in Sweden^*2. A common question remains: what does a place do to a photograph? Material, time, chance, and nonhuman behavior enter the visible record, extending documentation into the process by which the photograph is made.

Reception of Work That Gives Part of the Process to the Nonhuman

A Jeu de Paume interview groups The Pillar, Talking to Ants, and Night Procession as series emerging from long-term contact with nonhuman life^*19.

An Architectural Association lecture describes in detail how the prints for Buried were returned to the ground in Hackney Wick and how their corroded transformations were rephotographed^*20.

Foam’s 2013 retrospective presented the movement from urban observation in Hackney to Buried, Hackney Flowers, and Talking to Ants as a continuous set of methods linking documentary, chance, and intervention^*21.

The V&A has discussed Gill in relation to urban nature, highlighting his interest in the coexistence of people, architecture, and urban plant life within the same environment^*22.