Untitled

After having documented the London district of Hackney for fourteen years, artist Stephen Gill felt that there was something lacking in his work. How can you capture the intensity of busy city life in an image? By experimenting with the process of making as well as of printing his analogue photographs, he found new ways to capture this feeling in images. For example, in his series Best Before End Gill experimented with energy drink: by letting the negatives soak in the sweet fluid for a while, the light-sensitive layer of the film softened. The result is an abstract image with wonderfully warm colours, as this picture shows. What feelings does this photograph evoke in you?

The series Best Before End was introduced to the public during Foam’s first major retrospective devoted to the English photographer Stephen Gill. In addition to Best Before End, the exhibition showed work from his series Talking to Ants, Buried, and Hackney Flowers.