Night Procession — Infrared Wildlife Photography by Stephen Gill
Between 2014 and 2017, Stephen Gill set motion-triggered infrared cameras at low positions against trees in the forests of southern Sweden, then withdrew. What returned were 86 colour plates recording the nocturnal movements of foxes, wild boars, deer, hares, mice, owls, snails, birds of prey, and fledglings — each animal unaware, each caught mid-passage through a world that ordinarily remains beyond the range of human observation.
The method was a systematic relinquishment of authorial control. Gill determined the placement of each camera — near a water source, along a likely path — but the shutter was triggered by the animals themselves. The infrared flash operates outside the visible spectrum of its subjects, producing images that carry the quality of apparition rather than document: figures emerging from total darkness, suspended in the moment of their own unknowing.
Karl Ove Knausgård contributes a 16-page essay, issued as a separate saddle-stitched booklet (132 × 210 mm), printed on Takeo Satogami Pink (81 gsm) with a cover on Takeo Tant Select TS-3 (116 gsm). In Knausgård's words: "The photographs in this book have a ceremonial quality about them, as if the animals and the birds present themselves to us one by one… we see them the way they are in themselves, in their own world, normally so out of reach from our own. The world we see in these images is a secret world… the mystery seems only to thicken."
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 runs to 160 pages across 86 colour plates, with endpapers carrying paintings by Gill. Design is by Greger Ulf Nilson. The book received the Benrido HARIBAN Award in 2017.
Published by Nobody Books, Gill's own imprint. Each copy in this edition is signed by Stephen Gill.
Further titles in our Photography & Photobooks collection, and in the Animals, Plants & Other Lives collection.
About Stephen Gill
Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol) is a British conceptual photographer whose practice is built around the systematic relinquishment of authorial control. Rather than directing his subjects, he has buried colour prints to let the land mark them, placed insects and seeds inside film chambers to create in-camera photograms, and used energy drinks to partially process film. In Night Procession, the animals themselves became the authors — triggering the camera while Gill slept. He is the founder of Nobody Books, through which he publishes his own work with close attention to materials and physical form. Other signed titles available include Please Notify the Sun, The Pillar, and Pigeons.
