STEPHEN GILL

Please Notify the Sun

17th August - 18th September 2023

From the series Night Procession, Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to his interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope.

Gill’s experimental technical forays run throughout his three decades of photographic practice and include burying images in the ground, developing negatives in energy drinks, and letting insects walk around inside the camera during shooting. Fotografihuset is now exhibiting excerpts from his three latest photobooks, which stem from Gill's farewell to London and his first encounters with the Swedish countryside. One of his new neighbours was Karl Ove Knausgård, who has written the texts for Gill's trilogy from Skåne. The exhibition "Please Notify the Sun" includes photographs, text, and film from his first decade in Sweden.

Throughout his career, Gill has worked with the idea of dialing down photography’s technical mastery in a gradual process of pulling back, giving his subjects the space to breathe. In his first art project as a newly settled resident in Skåne, "Night Procession," he attached cameras with motion sensors to the surrounding trees, creating a kind of party photo box for nocturnal creatures. In his next project, "The Pillar," he planted two poles on the edge of a field, equipping one of them with a camera that fired whenever a bird landed on the other. Four years later, the camera had portrayed hundreds of bird species, some mid-takeoff, others in a midday nap.

The work on his most recent project, "Please Notify the Sun," began when the pandemic halted both time and freedom of movement in 2020. Gill decided to venture inside a sea trout. Using a microscope and camera, he photographed the trout over ten weeks, becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the universe of mountain ranges, volcanoes, caves, and lunar landscapes that revealed themselves the deeper he delved into the fish's process of decay. He eventually became so ill that he had to interrupt his visual space odyssey and get to hospital.

"I collapsed in the parking lot and thought I had been poisoned by the fish, but now I realize it was probably COVID-19."

About the artist
Gill was born in Bristol in Great Britain in 1971. His photographs are held in various private and public collections and have also been exhibited at many international galleries and museums including Tate, National Portrait Gallery, and The Victoria and Albert Museum. He has published 27 photobooks through his own publishing house, Nobody Books, many of which have won awards.

Please Notify the Sun, Stephen Gill, FRAKT, 2023

Stephen Gill painting exhibition titles

The Pillar, Stephen Gill, FRAKT, 2023