(Signed) COEXISTENCE In by Stephen Gill
A collection of works by British photographer Stephen Gill.
"In the summer of 2010, I was invited to photograph a pond in the ruins of the old steelworks at Dudelange in Luxembourg. As a teenager, fascinated by pond life, I spent many hours in my bedroom, wearing a lab coat and peering through a microscope. This immersion and fascination with a strange and fascinating world has undoubtedly had a profound effect on me and left its mark on many of the photographic studies I have produced since. I knew that the Dudelange pond would be teeming with invisible life, now that its industrial past has come to an end. From the 1920s until it fell out of use in 2006, the pond was used to cool blast furnaces. Now that the intense heat is gone, a small but dense community would have formed and thrived. During the eight months leading up to my first visit to the site, my mind had gradually become attuned to the microscopic world of the world. I increasingly noticed many similarities between the patterns and processes in the pond and the patterns and processes of our lives as individual human beings in society. I gradually became interested in the idea of bringing these two seemingly disparate worlds closer together, logically close, but visually different in scale. Working with the idea of weaving together these parts of life that coexist but do not belong together, nor are they usually seen together, I decided to make a kind of tapestry-like photographic study. Thanks to the generosity of the University of Luxembourg, I was given a medical microscope, which allowed me to look at each drop of water. The more I thought about the essential human element of the series, the more I wanted to feature the people of Dudelange, a small town populated by many families with Portuguese and Italian roots. Many of them used to work in the steel industry. For health and safety reasons, I couldn't invite them to the cooling pond. I filled a red plastic bucket with pond water and dipped my underwater camera into it before taking portraits of the inhabitants of Dudelange. I then dipped the prints in the pond water as well, so that the microscopic life was transferred to the paper's surface. - Stephen Gill
-
Title: COEXISTENCE
Artist: Stephen Gill
Nobody Books and CNA, 2012
Hardcover, case binding
215 x 280 mm
152 pages
Text in English
First edition of 1500 (250 copies made of each cover)
ISBN: 978-0-9556577-8-8
¥55,000 -
