ARCHAEOLOGY IN REVERSE by Stephen Gill

イギリス人フォトグラファー、スティーブン・ギル（Stephen Gill）の作品集。作者の代表作「Hackney Wick」の撮影を中断した場所を撮り続けることで制作された作品シリーズ。ロンドン北東にあるその地域は、作者にとってとても大切な場所である。ハックニー・ウィックのマーケットで手に入れた50ペンスのカメラを使い続け、今回は未だ存在しないものにフォーカスし、さまざまなものの痕跡と手がかりを取り上げている。2012年のロンドン・オリンピックに向けて急激に変容していく予感があったこの地域で、それまでは宙吊りになった場所を詩的に、そして時には不気味で静かに写しだす写真による研究である。

“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 prior to the rapid transformation that the area faces during the build-up to the 2012 Olympics.