Stephen Gill

I came across Stephen Gill's work in Grafix magazine. His 'Hackney Flowers' series interested me as i had already taken some of my own photographs of flowers in the studio and around leeds.

This is a description of the series from the photographers website...
(http://www.stephengill.co.uk/nobody/books.html)

Stephen Gill has again used his surroundings as the inspiration for this beautiful and evocative series. Hackney Flowers has evolved from his series and book Hackney Wick. This times Gill has collected flowers, seeds, berries and objects from Hackney, East London, that were then pressed in his studio and re-photographed alongside his own photographs and found ephemera, thus building up multi-layered images extracted from the area. Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, allowing the subsequent decay to imprint upon the images, stressing this collaboration with place. A parallel series also runs within this finely produced volume, showing members of the public in Hackney with floral details on their person. This is a warm, poetic and visually exciting book containing images that leave an overwhelming sense of colour, emotion and rhythm extracted from a single borough of London.






The images were that particularly inspiring to me are the ones below...
I like the way Gill uses flowers to make an image pleasing to the eye which otherwise wouldn't be.

After researching Stephen Gill i had the idea to do a series of photographs based on council estates. There is a council estate opposite where i live in Leeds which has some quite unsightly high rise flats. I would like to photograph the estate and use my product photographs to make the buildings look more pleasing.


Buried...
This is another series of Gill's work entitled 'Buried'. Although they are not digitally manipulated they were created in a very interesting way...

The photographs were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried there.
The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the amount of rainfall. The depths that the pictures were buried at also varied, as did their positioning. Sometimes they were facing each other, sometimes back to back or sometimes buried singly.

Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and in a way collaborating with place - allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture - felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.
(http://www.stephengill.co.uk/buried/index.htm)





I really like how the colours run into each other. They remind me of the Nick Knight photos of Naomi Campbell. They become slightly abstract and there is a real texture about them. Although i will be creating my images digitally i would really like to emphasize texture within my work.



This is the article from Grafix magazine below. I find the methods he uses to produce his work very interesting... 'the method itself becomes a response to the subject.'