Stephen Gill. A Street in Hackney. photograph.With the ubiquity of digital cameras that take fool-proof images, and lots of them, it is interesting to see how many photographers persist in using film, but are doing something else with it.
Just as photography originally freed the making of images in paint from a kind of graphic fidelity, so too does the digital camera free photography from the faithful recording of what the eye supposedly sees. The speed and clarity of digital imagery allows film photography to become something other than its resolution and depth of field.
Stephen Gill puts things found on the street, where he took this photograph, into the camera as he loads his film. Although he can control what is aligned in the viewfinder and what is sitting on the film, he has little control over how the image turns out. It is something like catching things out of the corner of your eye as well as what the eye is taking in straight ahead.
I suppose he also controls which images he chooses to show – this one is particularly beautiful: a boring terrace in Hackney made mysterious somewhere deep in the camera.