Night Procession
Stephen Gill
The images of Night Procession, which took three years (2014 – 2017) to complete, reveal to us a world that is secret and mysterious. It shows us the animals and the world that is theirs when they are on their own and undisturbed by human presence. The world we see in these images is a secret world.
Stephen Gill (born 1971) is a British experimental photographer. His work is a hybrid between documentary and conceptual work. In 2005 he founded his publishing imprint Nobody in order to exercise maximum control over the publication process of his books. After suffering a burnout, Stephen Gill and his family moved in March 2014 from London to Glemmingebro, Österlen. A village in the southeastern part of Sweden. The town where his partner Lena is from.
On his many walks he came to realise that this apparently bleak, flat and open landscape was filled with life. During daylight hours he found traces like clusters of feathers, animal footprints and gnawed branches. So he started to imagine the animals in absolute darkness on the forest floor. He 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. This approach added an element of uncertainty, without knowing exactly where the images would land. It is as if the animals presented themselves.
Stephen Gill has always experimented wildly in his photobooks. In the case of one series of photographs taken in London he buried them in the ground and left them there for a number of days (Hackney Flowers). In another case he introduced objects and creatures such as ants from his surroundings into the body of his camera, producing images stained with shadows (Talking To Ants). A third series was taken at a pond with the lens dipped in water from the same pond (Pond Life).
In Night Procession there’s plenty of fauna: an opaque silhouette of a deer, glaring boars, a fox sipping from a stream, death-eyed elk, wing-flapping owls. And plenty of flora too. Many shots lean heavily toward abstraction. These are images without wider perspective; they are without horizon, without sky.
The images of nocturnal woodland creatures were created manually and by motion-sensitive cameras Gill postioned in the undergrowth. Gill was curious about the idea of stepping back as the author of images, to give space for chance, and to encourage the subject to step forward. The results are spectral glimpses of a secret, nocturnal world of activity that exists unseen alongside our human realm. Stephen Gill has moved away from the centre. It are images without ego.
Gill even goes one step further. He doesn’t simply print the photo’s he’s taken, he often physically fools with them. In Night Procession he used plant pigments from the surrounding areas to make the final master prints. So nature itself helped to decide the palette and the feel of the images.
The intention of the book was to capture the forest at night. We get nocturnal forest rituals far from human eyes. The forest becomes a secret place. So wondrous captured in Night Procession.
Night Procession
Photographer: Stephen Gill
Published by Nobody
Published in 2017
Foil embossed three-part clothbound hardback
16 page saddle-stitched booklet with text
160 pages, 86 colour plates, 21,6 x 27 cm
Words by Karl Ove Knausgard
Shortlisted for the Author Book Award 2018 at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles
Chosen by people immersed in the photobook world as one of their favorite photobooks of 2017