Untitled

What do you experience when you look at the colours and textures in this photograph? Since there is no clear subject, the viewer is drawn into an interplay of warm colours and abstract shapes. Instead of telling a story, this photograph seems intended to convey a feeling. Untitled is part of the series Best Before End, in which Gill attempts to visualise the intensity of urban life in the London borough of Hackney. For this series, artist Stephen Gill experimented with the photographic process by soaking the negatives in energy drink. The result is a dreamy image, where virtually all traces of the original image have disappeared. Untitled is like a visual poem, in which the message lies beneath the surface.

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.