Coming up for air: A retrospective- Stephen Gill 16 October – 16 January 2021, ARNOLFINI, Bristol
This exhibition draws together new and previously un-exhibited work from the Bristol born and based photographer. He is described as a “‘documentarist’, ‘anthropologist’ and ‘dazzling visual poet’”, Bristol Photo Festival (2021) his over-arching ethos is experimentation, which has led to chemical and alchemical experiments such as photographic burials, floral collage, in-camera photograms and submerging work. His experimentation takes his work beyond the usual boundaries of photography.
The exhibition presented a huge amount of his work, I detail below the series that were of particular interest to myself or my practice:
Please notify the sun (2020):
is a good example of what the gallery guide describes his work as exploratory journeys. For this he repeated a journey 9 times over 10 weeks to photograph a decaying fish he’d caught. To achieve this, he prepared the equipment he’d need beforehand, worktop, fridge, microscope, and lights. The gallery description describes the series revealing an unknown but somehow unfamiliar environment as you travel through the fish. The images are microscopic photographs of a fish, although they would be unrecognisable as a fish if you didn’t know this. They appear as unusual abstract shapes in a variety of colours some quite strong, with textures; through these images Gill creates a whole new landscape through the fish’s body.
Words, B. (s.d.) Please notify the sun. At: https://beyondwords.co.uk/please-notify-the-sun (Accessed 09/11/2021).
Night procession 2014-17:
Gill took these images in a Swedish forest by attaching cameras with motion sensors to trees at a low level to capture creatures at night. Here he uses chance as a method, relinquishing to a degree his authorship of the photographs, encouraging the subjects to present themselves. These are printed with locally collected plant pigments, it was the beauty in the organic black and white prints now as collotypes which attracted me, the plant and tree subjects rather than the animal subjects.
Gallery installation images
Buried 2005-6:
The gallery text describes this as a:
“collaboration between myself and the place. I would make half the work and the place would make the other half. It was an early attempt to step back as the author” (Gill, 2021).
After taking the images he buried them beneath the ground for varying lengths of time, dictated by the amount of rainfall, and varying depths and positions; allowing the “place” to make its mark upon the work. Each photograph bears individual traces of time. The original images are now very distorted:
Gallery installation image
Off ground 2011:
This was Gill’s way of responding to the aftermath of the 2011 London riots. Not wanting to add to the film and stills footage of the violence he collected fragments of thrown rocks and rubble. These he took back to his studio and made photographic portraits of them. An interesting method of capturing an event, Gill says “I see such studies as starting points for reflection, that are pinpointed to a certain time and place” (Gill, 2021).
Talking to Ants 2009-2013:
Is described as work that is both in front and behind the lens. Gill scooped up objects and inserted the detritus (dust, glass, plastic, insects, plant life and so on) into the body of the camera, resulting in surprise outcome again, with both chance and intention colliding in the images he knew the ingredients, but not the outcome. He describes this as incapsulating the spirit of the place in film emulsion “like objects embedded in amber” (Gill, 2021). Here again is confusion of scale, lack of information and ambiguity. The background objects are obscured by the items in front of them from inside the camera. The colour of the objects changes the landscape behind and the size of them alters the sense of scale; the layering creates new landscapes.
Hackney flowers 2004-7:
This is an attempt to describe what a place feels like beyond a visual description, an attempt to capture the essence of it. Taken in Hackney like many of his series, he added organic matter, such as flowers to the images, whilst he also buried some of the images. For this series he used a medical camera which resulted in a strange and confusing sense of scale. Base images with people place and objects overlayered with organic matter often to deliberately create an illusion.
My learning:
I was amazed at the breadth of Gill’s work. I had briefly researched Gill for my BOW genre coursework and then commented that his techniques did not appeal to me but that it demonstrates how broad a photographic response to a place can be. However, having viewed his work firsthand I found aspects that I should note:
- Value in letting your curiosity lead you.
- Playing with scale, whether that is with the equipment used (Camera, lens, lighting) or other methods.
- Revealing and denying
- Finding ways of allowing chance and intention to work together- possibly relinquishing authorship in some way.
- Experimentation
- Finding alternative ways of place making its mark on work
Reference:
Bristol Photo Festival (2021) Coming up for Air: A Retrospective – Stephen Gill. At: http://www.bristolphotofestival.org/coming-up-for-air-a-retrospective-stephen-gill/ (Accessed 09/11/2021).
NIKI SOUTH 