“…trabajar con las debilidades de la fotografía junto con sus fortalezas descriptivas subjetivas es un reto que disfruto.” Stephen Gill

La mejor manera de organizar nuestro conocimiento artístico y placer estético hoy en día es saber cómo organizar las redes sociales que más nos gustan. Por ejemplo, Instagram. Seguir, por fascinación y placer, a los autores que descubrimos cada mañana, y que exploramos fácilmente al final del día, siguiendo sus obras, pero también sus gustos y elecciones, es una nueva forma de amar el arte y de crecer a su lado.

Obviamente, seguimos algunos de los museos, galerías y publicaciones que admiramos, los cuales, a su vez, con la ayuda de la inteligencia artificial, nos devuelven sugerencias e información en sintonía con nuestras preferencias. El árbol de conocimientos en línea está creciendo rápidamente. Cuando menos lo esperamos (¡de hecho siempre estamos esperando estos momentos!) aparecen sorpresas, descubrimientos, amor a primera vista. Este fue el caso esta mañana, cuando vi las fotografías de Stephen Gill en Instagram.

Hace mucho tiempo que no encuentro un autor tan libre de estereotipos, tan naturalista o, lo que es lo mismo, tan capaz de devolvernos una visión espontánea, inteligente y viva de las cosas simples y eternas que nos rodean y nos hacen felices. En un momento tan marcado por la incertidumbre y la paranoia narcisista, es una bendición airear la vista frente a las historias contadas por este fotógrafo inglés.*

António Cerveira Pinto

Stephen Gill (born 1971) is a British experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer. Books are a key aspect of Gill’s practice.

Gill is a British photographer, who mainly draws inspiration from his immediate surroundings of inner city life in East London and more recently Sweden with an attempt to make work that reflects, responds and describes the times we live in.

His work is often made up of long-term photo studies exploring and responding to the subjects in great depth.

[…]

In January 2003 Gill bought a Bakelite 1960s box camera made by Coronet for 50 pence at Hackney Wick Sunday market, near where he lived. The camera had a plastic lens, and it lacked focus and exposure controls.

Over the next four years he had used the camera to photograph within the extremely varied environment of Hackney Wick, including waterways and allotments; and to make portraits of people at the Sunday market and who lived and worked in the area.

The subject parameters to this long-term obsession were geographical rather than conceptual.

The lack of image clarity that the plastic camera offered aligned very much with Gill’s frame of mind at the time. As such images seemed to deny information, but somehow managed to retain a heightened sense of place and allow the images to breathe without forcing a point.

in Wikipedia

Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to his father and interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope.

“Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…”

Iain Sinclair

in sitio oficial de Stephen Gill

 

*Traducción realizada con el traductor www.DeepL.com/Translator