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Archaeology in Reverse

by Stephen Gill

Photographs: Stephen Gill

Text: Iain Sinclair

Publisher: Archiv of Modern Conflict

104 pages

Pictures: 104

Year: 2007

ISBN: Archiv of Modern Conflict

Price: 48 €

Comments: 21,6 x 21,6 cm. Linen.

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 over-eager, 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….’

– Iain Sinclair

Continuing to photograph where his award-winning book Hackney Wick left off, Stephen Gill has made Archaeology in Reverse in his cherished area of east London, again using the camera he bought at Hackney Wick market for 50p. This time, however, he focuses on things that do not yet exist, revealing traces and clues of future developments in a sometimes eerie photographic study of a place in a state of limbo before the rapid transformation that the area underwent for the 2012 Olympics.

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