A vida é bela!

“...working with photography’s weaknesses alongside its subjective descriptive strengths is a challenge I enjoy.” Stephen Gill

A melhor maneira de hoje organizarmos o nosso conhecimento artístico e prazer estético passa por sabermos organizar as redes sociais de que mais gostamos. Por exemplo, o Instagram. Seguir, por fascínio e prazer, os autores que descobrimos em cada manhã que passa, e que febrilmente exploramos ao fim do dia, seguindo as suas obras, mas também os seus gostos e escolhas, é uma nova forma de amar a arte e de crescer ao seu lado.

Seguimos obviamente alguns museus, galerias e publicações que admiramos, as quais, por sua vez, retribuem, com a ajuda da inteligência artificial, sugestões e informações sintonizadas com as nossas preferências. A árvore do conhecimento online cresce rapidamente. Quando menos esperamos (na verdade estamos sempre à espera destes momentos!) surgem as surpresas, a descoberta, o amor à primeira vista. Foi o caso esta manhã, quando vi, pela primeira vez, as fotografias de Stephen Gill no Instagram.

Há muito que não encontrava um autor tão livre de estereotipos, tão naturalista, ou, o que o mesmo, tão capaz de nos devolver uma visão espontânea, inteligente e viva das coisas simples e eternas que nos rodeiam e fazem felizes. Num tempo tão marcado pela incerteza e pela paranóia narcisista, arejarmos a vista diante das histórias contadas por este fotógrafo inglês, é uma bênção.

António Cerveira Pinto

Stephen Gill (born 1971) is a British experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer. Books are a key aspect to 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 breath without forcing a point. 

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

Stephen Gill homepage