The British photographer Stephen Gill uses the medium of photography in an unconventional way, in order to not only document a place and its inhabitants but to also comprehend them affectively. For 14 years the Hackney borough in East London provided the object of his photographic research. With his experimental approach he has succeeded in capturing the genius loci in a manner that is touching and simultaneously startling. His playful handling of photography breaks with traditional concepts of mimetic precision and technical perfection: by burying his photographs in the ground or soaking them in a pond, he places them in touch with the essence of the elemental and thus invests them with a new credibility and a poetic dimension.
