Commissioned to produce cover image for Blueprint’s relaunch issue entitled ‘Airports: the Landscape of the Future’. The magazine includes the essay ‘Airports: Cities of the Future’ by J G Ballard and shows. Images from the exhibition ‘Airport’ at the Photographer’s Gallery.

www.photonet.org.uk

Cover image from issue of The Photographers Gallery magazine features the programme of exhibitions and events looking at the airport, one of the most significant architectural and urban developments of the past thirty years.

Extract from editorial

‘Called Stade, the show is a collection of specially commissioned photographs by artist Stephen Gill (photographer of Blueprint’s award-winning airport cover). Gill has documented the two principal Paris stadia - the newly built Stade de France and the refurbished Parc des Princes.
Gill, a great football fan himself, does not set the architecture up in competition with the game. He knows it’s what happens on the pitch that is really important. Instead of a straight study of stadium design, his affectionate portraits, with player’s tunnels bathed in an ethereal golden light, set the scene for the charged atmosphere of the championship to come.’

Extract

‘The stadium looks both monumental and somehow portable and, but for the industrial skyline just visible on the horizon, it could be anywhere. Latent in the repetitious patterns of the seats, the structural pylons and the grass are both the passion and the obsessiveness of football fans. The grass, gridded and improbably lush, looks no more natural than the red plastic seats; the serene atmosphere gives no suggestion of the bitter North-Eastern winters in which most of the ground’s games are played. The stadium looks more like the setting for a football-based computer game than for the real thing’.

Extract from ‘Zeitgeist’

‘Goebbels staged dramatic rallies that were meant to encourage the volk to dream about the Reich as a reincarnation of the Roman Empire. The theatricality and emotional resonance of such mass meetings (throughout the South African elections the news was full of images of politicians addressing crowds at sports stadiums) is echoed in Stephen Gill’s pictures of football parks....’

Commissioned by John Brown Publishing to produce a series of photographs of mini-golf courses around Great Yarmouth. The feature ‘Swing when you’re Winning’ included text by Andy Miller from the book ‘Tilting at Windmills: How I tried to stop worrying and love sport’.

Commissioned by Premier Media Partners to photograph the construction of The City of Manchester Stadium used for the Commonwealth Games 2002 and the new home of Manchester City Football Club. The feature ‘Two for the price of one’ includes accompanying text by Patrick Tooher.