The Pillar
The Pillar is Stephen Gill's five-year study of the birds that came to perch on a wooden post he installed in a Swedish field, a quiet, sustained act of observation built entirely around one fixed point in the landscape.
Between 2015 and 2019 Gill positioned a camera trap on the pillar and let birds trigger their own portraits across the seasons, resulting in 31 color plates and 95 quadtone black-and-white plates of the species that landed there. Published by Gill's own imprint Nobody in 2019, the book is a foil-embossed, three-part clothbound hardback of 224 pages, including a gatefold and monoprinted endpapers, accompanied by a 12-page saddle-stitched booklet of text by Karl Ove Knausgård.
Gill (born 1971, Bristol) has spent much of his career working in and around a single patch of land near Bristol or, as here, returning obsessively to one site until it yields an entire book. The Pillar won the 2019 Rencontres d'Arles Author Book Award and extends the patient, process-driven method of earlier projects like Buried and Night Procession.
