Stephen Gill: Hackney Flowers

In 2005, Stephen Gill published Hackney Wick, a book of photographs of the marginalized people who lived and worked in this vibrant yet slightly disreputable London neighborhood--home of the notorious Black Market bazaar--which was scheduled for destruction in order to make way for the 2012 Olympics. Made with a second-hand camera bought from a street vendor, the beautifully composed, low-fi photographs were haunting and affectionate--and, as a collection, worthy of inclusion in Martin Parr and Gregory Badger's essential compendium, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. Hackney Wick is now long out of print, and first editions sell for hundreds of dollars. In this beautifully produced follow-up volume, Gill collects and presses flowers, seeds, berries and other ephemeral materials found on the streets of Hackney, and composes them as collage elements on top of previously-made photographs of the neighborhood in transition. For this series Gill buried some of the base photographs under a layer of Hackney soil for a time, allowing them to erode and decompose prior to being re-photographed with the pressed materials. A parallel portrait series captures neighborhood people, also with floral elements collaged on top. Together, Hackney Flowers is a warm and poetic collection that captures the flavors and rhythms of this singular immigrant neighborhood as it cedes its idiosyncratic personality to the generic sports-Modernism of the 2012 Games.

UK photographer Stephen Gill has again used his surroundings as the inspiration for this beautiful and evocative series. Hackney Flowers evolved from Gill's longstanding interest in Hackney, East London. For this volume, Gill collected flowers, seeds, berries and objects from Hackney, then pressed them in his studio and rephotographed them alongside his own photographs and other found ephemera, thus building up multi-layered images built from the area. Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, allowing the subsequent decay to imprint upon the images, stressing this collaboration with place. A parallel series also runs within this finely produced book, showing members of the Hackney public with floral details on their persons. This is a warm, poetic and visually exciting book containing images that leave an overwhelming sense of color, emotion and rhythm extracted from a single borough of London.