Night Procession

Night Procession — Infrared Wildlife Photography by Stephen Gill

Night Procession documents three years of work in the forests of southern Sweden, from 2014 to 2017. Using motion-triggered infrared cameras fixed at low level against trees, Stephen Gill recorded the nocturnal movements of wild animals — foxes, wild boars, deer, hares, mice, owls, snails, birds of prey, fledglings — without direct presence or interference. The animals themselves triggered the shutter.

The method was deliberate in its relinquishment of authorial control. Gill positioned cameras where he imagined a deer might drink or an owl might perch, then stepped back entirely. What the infrared flash returned — operating outside the animals' own visual spectrum — were images that feel less like documentation than apparition: figures emerging from darkness, caught mid-movement, unaware. The photographs carry a ceremonial quality, each animal appearing as if in procession, one by one, through a world that closes again at dawn.

Karl Ove Knausgård contributes a 16-page essay, issued as a separate saddle-stitched booklet printed on Takeo Satogami Pink (81 gsm) with a cover on Takeo Tant Select TS-3 (116 gsm). His text does not explain the photographs so much as hold them at a considered distance — framing the images as windows into a world that exists in parallel to human perception, present and real, but ordinarily out of reach.

The main volume is a foil-embossed three-part clothbound hardcover, 216 × 270 mm, printed on Mohawk superfine at Göteborgs Tryckeriet in Sweden and bound at S.R. Buege in Germany. It contains 160 pages and 86 colour plates. The endpapers carry paintings by Gill. Design is by Greger Ulf Nilson. The book was awarded the Benrido HARIBAN Award in 2017.

Published by Nobody Books, Gill's own imprint, which he founded to control the material form of each publication as closely as its content. Each copy in this edition is signed by Stephen Gill.

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