Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971. He was introduced to photography at a very early age by his dad and was interested in photographing in birds, animals and music.He is now living in Hackney, London, and does very fieldwork art, he had won over 20 awards to do with photography, and has done just under 40 exhibition exhibited with his work.

Off Ground

Most of his work is very quite in the way that you can imagine him, for example,  just going out at the end of a big event and just be that one man taking random and plain photos, and that is what he does in a project called 'Off Ground' where he went out after the riot and photographed piece of rubble and brick individually, so he was not getting lots of people involved helping him going out to do this very big piece of art, instead he did it alone and just collected the bits of brick and then took photos of them on a black and white back round one by on

This is an example of one of the bricks that he took a photographed.

This work is could be look on to be very boring, just taking photographs of some bricks, but it makes it much more interesting, and gives a lot more value when it has something to do with such a big event in London and that changes the way that you could look on it. I feel really interested in this type of quite and solo work because he is portraying this event just in a very different way and using in inanimate object to tell the story.

Covered or Removed

Another project he did was also very simple, but had a lot of meaning just portrayed in a different way was called 'Covered or Removed' and the title is almost like a rhetorical question. His idea was that because of where he lived was in London, there was a lot of graffiti and the council would have sent people to go out and paint over the graffiti to try and get rid of it and remove it, but then he started to think about are we really removing it, or just doing more graffiti over the original graffiti.

It's interesting because the more you look at Stephen Gill's work, you realise that he has a very different, but very clever way of thinking, and showing what he wants to photograph and I like the way that he is quite suttle in what and the way he goes out and photographs the ordinary, and makes it interesting.

Bill Boards

Bill Boards is a range of photographs that are of bill boards, but not the way you think it would be photographed. Stephen goes out and take photos of the back of the bill boards, not the front where most     people would look and the information that the board would be presenting is. 

When doing this, what he is doing is taking everyday things just on the side of streets, but looking at them in a different views, not the way we are meant to see them. It also gives it another view in the sense that the front is made to look good and attractive to the eye, whilst the back is much more boring and dull with just some metal and planks of wood to hold it up, even though it is just as important as the front because that is what supports it and structures the whole board.

Outside In

This was a very interesting project because Stephen Gill is taking, for example, the visual element of texture to a whole new level by actually putting a 3D object inside the photo. What he did was go to Brighton with an old fashioned box camera and pick up things from where ever he was and put them in the actual box of the camera so that when he took the photo of where he got the objects they would get in the way of the light coming into the photo and appear as if the objects where just placed on top of the photo. 

                                                                                                                                                   

           

You can tell that this is one of Stephen Gill's ways of thinking, because he isn't just taking a photo of the people and things around Briton, but the simple things that he found around on the floor. It also gives quite a quirky feel to it because you know that what ever is in the camera shouldn't be in there, but then it also gives it demotions and texture.

A Series of Disappointments

This was where he went to a betting parlor and took out the betting slips of people who had lost, screwed up and thrown in the bin in either anger, frustration, or disappointment.

Looking at the differences between the ways that they have been discarded, you could possibly tell a lot from just the way that they took there emotions out of this little bit of paper. For example, the simple once that have been screwed into a ball would have probably been out of anger because it is just a quick way to get rid of it, bet the ones that are a little more creative and you can tell that it has taken someone some time to do so might have been more to do with the disappointment of things because maybe the only reasons that they are betting in the first place was because they don't have anything else to do and now that they have just lost and wasted how ever much money, they would be a bit startled and now don't have anything to do again.