Hackney Flowers

Book excerpt: UK photographer Stephen Gill has again used his surroundings as the inspiration for this beautiful and evocative series. "Hackney Flowers" evolved from Gill's longstanding interest in Hackney, East London. For this volume, Gill collected flowers, seeds, berries and objects from Hackney, then pressed them in his studio and rephotographed them alongside his own photographs and other found ephemera, thus building up multi-layered images built from the area. Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, allowing the subsequent decay to imprint upon the images, stressing this collaboration with place. A parallel series also runs within this finely produced book, showing members of the Hackney public with floral details on their persons. This is a warm, poetic and visually exciting book containing images that leave an overwhelming sense of color, emotion and rhythm extracted from a single borough of London.