Archaeology in Reverse

Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, "closure." There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones... --Iain Sinclair
Continuing to photograph where his award-winning book Hackney Wick left off, Stephen Gill also made Archaeology in Reverse in this personally cherished area of East London. Still making pictures with the camera he bought at Hackney Wick market for 50 pence, for this volume Gill focuses on things that do not yet exist.
This magnificently produced book features traces and clues of things to come in a poetic, sometimes eerie and quiet photographic study of a place in a state of limbo prior to the rapid transformation that the area faces during the build-up to the Olympics in 2012.

Iain Sinclair (b. 1943, Cardiff Wales) is a novelist, poet, essayist, and filmmaker. He is the noted author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize); London Orbital; Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights out for the Territory, and numerous other publications, Iain Sinclair focuses on the contemporary London experience. Ian Sinclair has been dubbed a psychogeographer, which he explains as "psychoanalyzing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live." Sinclair lives in the London neighborhood of Hackney.