Pigeons – Stephen Gill
Published by Nobody Books in association with the Archive of Modern Conflict, Pigeons is a photobook by British photographer Stephen Gill that turns its lens not on pigeons as we see them, but on the city as they inhabit it. The book contains 29 colour photographs made from within the birds' own environment — beneath bridges, inside rusted structures, through the gaps and crannies of post-industrial urban space.
Gill's approach inverts the anthropocentric perspective. Rather than placing the pigeon within a human frame, the images enter a parallel urban world where our architecture reads as natural landscape — bridges as beaver dams, buildings as termite mounds. The presence of juvenile birds, rarely documented and almost mythological in the popular imagination, runs through the series as a quiet revelation. Text by Will Self accompanies the photographs, extending the conceptual inversion into language.
The book is clothbound in rough linen with a silk-screened cover — a physical object whose materiality echoes its subject. This copy is signed. It was printed at EBS in Verona on Mohawk Superfine white eggshell stock and first published in 2014.
Further titles in our Photography & Photobooks collection are available to browse.
