Stephen gill born in 1971 Bristol, UK began his love for photography at an extremely young age due to the influence from his father and his interest in insect which created Gill’s initial interest with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his own microscope.
Gill now focuses on his inspirations from the surroundings of the inner city life in East London and heading towards looking at Sweden as well and looking into the idea of reflecting and portraying images that help describe and emphasis the times we are currently live in. His work is often made up of long-term photo studies exploring and responding to the subjects in great depth. Throughout his career Gill has experimented with a large array of trials for examples, he mainly worked with black and white imagery from 1984 then followed by a lot more colour interpreted in his work in mid 1990s.
It’s said that until around 2003 his work has been said to have an extremely descriptive and typographical approach towards the subjects.
After working mainly in black and white from 1984, his practice since the mid 1990s was mostly in colour.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. As previously mentioned Gill enjoyed to experiment and in January 2003 he bought a Bakelite 1960s box camera produced by Coronet for only 50 pence from Hackney Wick Sunday market, which was near where he lived at the time. The camera had a plastic lens, and lacked focus and exposure control.
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.
It was then announced that the area Gill had been focusing his photography on would be redo eloped 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. This stage of photography he named as an idea as starting over or walking away from the old. It was important that his content was first as he believed it played an important role in rather than the technique.
An obsession with this part of London lasted over ten years and led to many different series including – Hackney Wick, Archaeology in Reverse, Warming Down, Buried, Off Ground, A Series of Disappointments, Talking to Ants and Best Before End.Best Before End looks at the phenomenon of energy drink consumption. This time rather than describing the subject, Gill used the drinks as an aid to make the finished images as the negatives partly processed in energy drinks of different kinds. It allowed the drinks to shift and alter the images with a small amount of manual intervention.
