Coming up for Air Stephen Gill – A Retrospective
Stephen Gill
Nobody Books
English
Hardcover
624 pages
178 x 245 mm
2021
ISBN 9789198523348
Coinciding with Arnolfini’s major autumn exhibition Coming up for Air: Stephen Gill – A Retrospective (16 October 2021 to 16 January 2022), this enthralling publication encompasses over 40 years of practice (from 1982 to 2021), featuring some of Gill’s first photographs (taken as a child), and selected images from Gill’s best-known series, such as the award winning The Pillar, Talking to Ants and Hackney Flowers, alongside lesser-known collections, Invisible, Russian Women Smokers and Audio Portraits, and early images of Bristol, where Gill was born.
Bringing together an exhaustive array of photography and technical approaches, including over 450 colour and 150 black and white plates, Coming up for Air… creates an invaluable journey through Gill’s extraordinary career, which has seen him described in turn as a ‘documentarist’, ‘anthropologist’ and ‘dazzling visual poet’.
(Source: https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/coming-up-for-air-stephen-gill-a-retrospective-catalogue-2021-)
About the Artist
Gill’s passion for photography was sparked by his father’s quiet influence and fuelled by an early fascination with insects, birdlife, and the tiny pond creatures he’d gather to examine under a microscope. Music, too, has long been a steady companion. Together, these early obsessions nurtured a sense of wonder, and image-making became not only a way of exploring such curiosities but a means of responding to his surroundings and to the subjects that intrigue or move him. Over time, it has become an essential form of articulation and expression.
As the years have passed, Gill’s relationship with photography has continued to evolve.
While he values photography’s strengths, he remains increasingly aware of its limits, how straight descriptive photographs are often unable to convey more elusive emotions, feelings, or ideas that lie beyond the glass wall of clarity, projection, and control. He works outside those limits, developing a quiet trust in chance and what can be withheld. In reducing information, he often finds that something vital — a presence, a spirit — can remain, allowing the subject to breathe without interference.
Gill continues to explore the idea that even the most abstract or ambiguous images can carry a truth, sometimes more illuminating than a clear visual description, however factual it may appear. In a time when images flood every corner of life and certainty feels harder to hold, he chooses to relinquish much of the authorship and control, seeking instead to honour his subjects by handing much of the authorship back to them. He is often drawn to finding ways to collaborate with his subjects or to assist them to fully speak for themselves, without the images being suffocated by the medium or the maker.
https://www.stephengill.co.uk/
(Source: https://www.stephengill.co.uk/about/)
About the Publisher
Stephen founded his publishing imprint Nobody in 2005 in order to exercise maximum control over the publication process of his books. His overriding intention is to make the book the finished expression of the photographs, rather than just a shell in which to house them. Experimentation with materials, collaboration with friends, and a hands-on, tactile approach to maquette making would lead, in many cases, to his finished books having an individual, unique presence. This tactile approach includes materials and techniques such as lino cut printing, letter press printing, mono prints, spray paint, rubber stamps, and, on occasion, entire art books are manufactured and assembled by hand in Stephen’s studio. He considers the bookmaking process to be a key though separate stage in the production of his photographic works, and he aims to make books that are conceptually consistent with their content.
https://www.nobodybooks.com/
(Source: https://www.nobodybooks.com/)
