Stephen Gill

This is Stephen Gills 'Outside In', a series I once saw down in Brighton, infact, I saw last November, in Brighton.
Each photo in the Outside In series is essentially a photograph with a place, with bits of plant life, rubbish found on the floor, seeds, grass, and even insects on the film. The object sits on the film emulsion when he's taking the picture. Its a perfect way of actually combining a place with the essence of that place. It shows how people live, the visual noise they have around them and the complete choas that that entails.
We so often live without really stopping to look at how and where we live, how people are, what surroundings we have and how that actually affects us, and our lives.
Gill used this method to show that we dont really know or stop to think of any of this till we process the film of our lives, we don't know where our emotions (the objects) will sit or fall, and we live half blind of who we are.
Similarly, if you were to create a photogram (placing objects onto a piece of darkoom (light sensitive) paper, shining a light, and then developing the paper, leaving a white 'shadow' of the object) you would have a similar result, you don't know what you're going to get, or how the objects come together if they're just a white shadow. You could even use a negative to provide a sort of background, as I have done in the past, or, if your only option is digital, getting a photograph and placing white cut outs of an image onto the photograph, then photographing that photograph and editing it till it looks like its come straight from a darkroom. You can manipulate the way you see things, and the way we view things so easily, yet we never choose to do it.

Outside In is very close to me as I'm so very interested in other peoples minds, how they percieve things, the ideas they have and the way they view their lives, everyone has this different interpretation of life, but we all live together without sharing this interpretation.
I've used Gills work to inspire a project i did last year, where i picked up one thing each day, created a collection and photographed it. By using slices of other peoples lives that they'd discarded on the street, I managed to show how close as people we are, but how much we discard each other, and how much of our lives we choose to ignore.

When Gill showed his work, he put in the center all the things he'd collected, which is exactly what I did when it came to my exhibition, and I find it shows alot about the processes of life and the things we are, the things we take, the things we discard, the things that make us up.

I think everyone can find a little slice of themselves in Outside In, and if you can't, you simply aren't looking hard enough.


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