Stephen Gill - Coming up for Air

Nobody's Bookshop, "Coming up for Air is the result of Stephen Gill’s long-term photographic body of work made in Japan between 2008 & 2009. These images create a chance to sink into a kind of fictional aquatic world that somehow leaves you gasping for breath.

Unlike other well-known series by Gill this time the information in his images has been starved, completely denied or mimized in favour of achieving ‘a kind of fictional aquatic world."

Photographer Stephen Gill: the devil in the detail - Telegraph - By Tamsin Blanchard: "Timothy Prus, who runs the Archive of Modern Conflict, says, 'Coming up for Air really marks a turning point for Stephen. He’s really raised the bar with it. This is by far the best, but you expect really good stuff to start coming now he is in his late thirties.’

Prus says Gill is trying to make his work quieter and quieter. 'It’s about a lot of things. It’s about our human condition as if we were fish in a Japanese aquarium. He is relating the condition of fish to a world outside the glass they know nothing about. It’s a funny feeling looking at the pictures as if you are stuck on the other side of the page. There are a wholeload of underlying issues. On another level, it’s quite a jolly book about a romp through Japanese aquariums.’ Prus says that Gill has dedicated two special editions of his book to his veteran 20-year-old goldfish, Chippy, who is also given an acknowledgement in the book.

Coming up for Air is the result of a long process of editing, printing, choosing papers and cloth bindings, finding the right printer (Gill chose one in Belgium), as well as the right material for the dust jacket."

Related Links:

Stephen Gill - http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/news

Outside Inside by Bruce Davidson

Outside Inside by Bruce Davidson - Sean O'Hagan The Observer
"I view my work as a series," writes Davidson. "I often find myself as an outsider on the inside, discovering beauty and meaning in the most desperate of situations."

Steidl,  "Over the course of his long career Bruce Davidson has travelled the world making reportage stories both on assignment as a member of the Magnum agency and on subjects of personal interest. A few years ago he returned to his archive of negatives housed in a room in his Manhattan apartment and began a ritual of revisiting each and every one of the stories he had made, from his work as a student in 1954 to his urban landscapes in Los Angeles in 2009. Printing in his darkroom alongside the archive, he began to elaborate a very personal selection, discovering forgotten images and throwing new light onto some of his most famous series. Outside Inside is the result of this work, a sumptuous three volume box set with fifty-three chapters over 800 pages. Each chapter is introduced by a short text written by Davidson himself. The result is a celebration of the development of a master of the medium and an autobiography, a photographer’s life seen through his work.

Outside Inside by Bruce Davidson - Steidl