Please Notify the Sun

Please Notify the Sun is a 2021 photobook by Stephen Gill, made by photographing inside the body of a fish, and published under Gill's own imprint, Nobody, with a text by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Gill began planning the project in 2017, assembling a home setup of a worktop, microscope, camera, optics, lights, and fridge to photograph the interior of a fish he would catch himself. By his own account it took nine trips and thirty hours of fishing before he landed one, on 10 April 2020, with his children on the shore. The pandemic lockdowns of that spring gave him the uninterrupted time he had been putting off using. The clothbound book collects 111 color plates from the resulting work and includes a separate saddle-stitched booklet carrying Knausgård's essay.

Gill, born in 1971, is a British photographer known for self-publishing and for working outside the conventional camera. He and Knausgård had already collaborated on The Pillar (2019), winner of the 2019 Rencontres d'Arles author book award. Gill's prints are held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and Tate, all in London.