GILL, Stephen - Night Procession

Background information

"In March 2014, my family and I moved from East London to rural south Sweden where my partner Lena is from. I understood that these new surroundings would inform my work in very different ways and that nature would play a key role. I was looking forward to making work that did not feel restricted and suffocated by modern photographic technology nor would make an inaccurate projected impression of the natural landscape we had become part of.   On my many walks, I soon came to realise that this new, apparently bleak, flat and open landscape was in fact teeming with intense life. Small clues appeared during daylight hours that helped me understand the extent of activity during the night. Clusters of feathers, animal footprints of all sizes showing regular overlapping routes, gnawed branches, eggshells, ant hills, nibbled mushrooms and busy snails and slugs working through the feast provided from the previous night I started to imagine the creatures in absolute darkness on the forest floor driven by instincts and their will to survive. I imagined them encountering each other. I thought of their eyes – near redundant in the thick of the night – and their sense of smell and hearing finely tuned and heightened. Envisaging where this activity might unfold, coupled with a hopeful foresight; I placed cameras equipped with motion sensors, to trees, mostly at a low level, so that any movement triggered the camera shutter and an infra-red flash (which was outside the animals’ visual spectrum). 
The first results filled me with fascination and joy as they presented what felt like stepping off into another parallel and unearthly world. The silent photographs also seemed to invent sounds. This frame of mind and way of working took me back to my first ever photo project at the age of 13, sitting in the bathroom window of my parents’ house in Bristol with a 10-metre cable release, attached to the camera, attempting to photograph garden birds. As time went on I started to think, if I were a deer where would I drink from, or if an owl where would I prefer to perch, and positioned cameras in such places. I was already composing the rectangular view in my mind’s eye – even though the nocturnal animals were absent – imagining they were there.  Nature itself helped to decide the palette and the feel of the images as plant pigments were incorporated from the surrounding areas to make the final master prints." (Stephen GILL)

Book review, content

"The photographs in 'Night Procession' have a ceremonial quality about them, as if the animals and the birds present themselves to us one by one – the fox, the hare, the wild boar, the deer, the mouse, the snail, the bird of prey, the fledglings, the owl – as well as something rather solemn, in that we see them the way they are in themselves, in their own world, normally so out of reach from our own. The world we see in these images is a secret world, though no less so when light re- turns to the land, the animals retreat into hiding and the forest again becomes recognisable to us; on the contrary, the mystery seems only to thicken." (Karl Ove KNAUSGARD, in: The world inside the world)

About British photographer Stephen GILL (b.1971)

Photo books by Stephen GILL