Signed; Stephen Gill - Talking to Ants - 2014

The photographs in this series were made in East London between 2009 and 2013. They feature objects and creatures that I sourced from the local surroundings and placed into the body of my camera.

I hoped through this method to encourage the spirit of the place to clamber aboard the images and be encapsulated in the film emulsion, like objects embedded in amber. My aim was to evoke the feeling of the area at the same time as describing its appearance as the subject was both in front and behind the camera lens at the same moment.

I like to think of these photographs as in-camera photograms in which conflict or harmony has been randomly formed in the final image depending on where the objects landed. – Stephen Gill