Words: Nadia Gilani

London based photographer Stephen Gill has been described as photographing small moments that most of us miss. Gill himself disagrees. “I sometimes think I photograph things people notice – it’s pictures of things we all do.” It could be that he does something in between.

Gill’s Lost series, photographs of people who are lost in London, was exhibited in St. Andrews subway station at this year’s Contact Toronto Photography Festival. Gill went out everyday for a month ‘losing’ himself in and around the Big Smoke looking for lost people. He says, “I really wanted to capture that vulnerable state people are in for five minutes.” And he effectively does.

In the split moment Gill seizes with the click of his shutter, we are drawn into the subject’s absorbed concentration and feelings of disorientation. Gill’s pictures reveal a profound study of the way in which people behave in an unfamiliar part of town, when having to resort to maps and guidebooks. They huddle together in twos and threes, shoulders curved into and squinting at their A-Z maps of London, trying to make sense of it all.

If alone, they might turn their body towards a wall or nearby lamppost, to conceal the fact that they are lost. Gill says this phase usually lasts about 30 seconds before people might try to make eye contact with passers-by for help.

As viewers – even those of us who are familiar with the city – we too feel a little lost since we are not told in additional notes where the people are going, where they are from or indeed the exact spot in which they are standing.

Sometimes after taking their photograph, the photographer would go over himself to see if he could help, and also to ask if it would be ok to use the picture he had taken. In most cases the subjects would agree. One exception came, however, when The Guardian newspaper published extracts from Gill’s “A Book of Field Studies”. He explains, “[One person] got really angry when his picture was published because he said he wasn’t lost at all!”

Fair play if the artist got it wrong, but Gill’s patient eye for detail, which places his work somewhere between documentary and the conceptual, suggests that lost or not that man must have looked like he was. It is this drawing attention to the familiar and obvious with such fragile scrutiny that makes Stephen Gill’s Lost series compelling and gently endearing.

“A Book of Field Studies” by Stephen Gill is published by Chris Boot. Stephen Gill’s website is www.stephengill.co.uk