Drawing with a camera: Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill

I was in Bristol not long ago and went to the Arnolfini to see the 'Coming up for Air' exhibition, a retrospective of the work of Stephen Gill. Gill is one of those photographers that I think of when I'm trying to work out the relationship between drawing and photography. He intervenes in the process of photography in what I would argue is a similar way to an artist that draws. He really gets to grips with his materials, and just as someone working with charcoal or graphite would investigate their materials both for their physical properties and possibilities and for their associations with the wider world that they emerged from, he pushes and pulls his cameras and various film stocks, into situations and relationships with the world that reveal the physical nature of a camera and its processes and how these properties can be used to build alternative associations with both people and the landscapes they inhabit. 

Outside in

He has buried prints underground so that the chemical processes of photographic image development meet the chemical processes of soil, has communicated with ants and let ravens dismantle his camera. In undertaking these various activities he blurs the boundaries between things. He opens out nouns like cameras, landscapes, people and film stock into verbs like, eroding, bleeding, unpicking, dismantling, seeing, drawing, turning and drowning. He makes us aware of processes and their effects, of unexpected interrelationships and shows us how photography can be a much more active discipline, one that reveals itself as an actant, rather than one that stays in the background as an objective observer. 

From Coexistence

In 'Coexistence' Gill looks for parallels between patterns and processes in a pond and the lives of individual humans that live in its vicinity. He brings these two disparate worlds together via a photographic study that uses medical microscopes to study single drops of the water, finding diatoms and other minuscule creatures and plant life but then involving local people from the small town of Dudelange, taking the pond to the people by filling a locally sourced red plastic mop bucket with water from the pond, and dipping an underwater camera into this pond water prior to making portraits of the Dudelange residents through the collected pond water. He also dipped the prints into the pond itself, so microscopic life was also transferred onto the surface of the paper.

Gill reminds us that the camera is a much more versatile tool than just a black box used to take photographs. Sometimes you need to break things in order to really find out what they can do. 

See also:

Drawing with light

The camera and the body

Drawing with a camera