Stephen Gill (photographer)

Stephen Gill (born 1971) is a British experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer. Books are a key aspect to Gill's practice.

Gill is a British photographer, who mainly draws inspiration from his immediate surroundings of inner city life in East London and more recently Sweden with an attempt to make work that reflects, responds and describes the times we live in.

His work is often made up of long-term photo studies exploring and responding to the subjects in great depth.

After working mainly in black and white from 1984, his practice since the mid 1990s was mostly in colour.

Until 2003 his work mostly had a descriptive and typographical approach towards the subjects. Eight of his photo studies made between 1997 and 2003 were assembled and published as chapters in a book called Field Studies in 2004, which also toured as an exhibition.

In January 2003 Gill bought a Bakelite 1960s box camera made by Coronet for 50 pence at Hackney Wick Sunday market, near where he lived. The camera had a plastic lens, and it lacked focus and exposure controls.

Over the next four years he had used the camera to photograph within the extremely varied environment of Hackney Wick, including waterways and allotments; and to make portraits of people at the Sunday market and who lived and worked in the area.

The subject parameters to this long-term obsession were geographical rather than conceptual.

The lack of image clarity that the plastic camera offered aligned very much with Gill's frame of mind at the time. As such images seemed to deny information, but somehow managed to retain a heightened sense of place and allow the images to breath without forcing a point.

It was later announced that the area Gill had been extensively photographing would be redeveloped for the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Paralympics.

Gill claims that this finished body of work was steered, informed and shaped by the place itself. And his approach to making the work was more reacting, responding and being carried by the subject rather than seeking out ideas that were already formed in the mind.

Gill described this period of working as walking away from photography or almost starting again, putting content first and technique second whilst aiming to also work with photography’s weaknesses rather than its descriptive strengths.

Having been attempting to take steps backwards and thus encouraging an element of chance to play a part in the image making, Gill hoped it allowed the subjects to unfold and not be suffocated by the technical parameters that the medium so often imposes.

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Wikipedia