Stephen Gill (born 1971) is a British experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer, whose work has been exhibited internationally along with his books that are a key aspect to Gill’s practice.
Gill's photographic work is held in various collections including:
Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…
According to Martin Parr (writing in 2004):
Stephen Gill is emerging as a major force in British photography. His best work is a hybrid between documentary and conceptual work and for this international it is the repeated exploration of one idea, executed with the precision that makes these series so fascinating and illuminating. Gill brings a very British, understated irony into portrait and landscape photography.[20]
Jon Ronson, writing in 2004 about Field Studies, was reminded of the Observer's Books:
Stephen's photos have all the naive gusto of the Observer series of old [. . .] Mercifully lacking in malevolence, they are also wise and modern and beautifully laden with tiny, understated details about the way we live today. [. . .] When you look at a Martin Parr photograph, everything about it says, instantly, Martin Parr. Stephen's photographs, however, are so subtle, so seemingly un-authored, it's only when you stare at them en masse and one after the other, you realise that they can only have been taken by Stephen Gill. There is a tremendous, quiet, respectful, cumulative power to his work.[21]