Coexistence by Stephen Gill

Published in 2012, choose your version signed or not.

In the summer of 2010, the author was invited to create a photographic response to a pond located in an industrial wasteland in Dudelange, Luxembourg—an area shaped by the now-defunct steelmaking industry. The invitation immediately connected to a formative teenage obsession with pond life and microscopy, an experience that had strongly influenced the author’s later photographic work. Knowing the pond had once cooled blast furnaces from the 1920s until it was decommissioned in 2006, the author anticipated that, without the furnaces’ extreme heat, the water would now be alive with dense microscopic communities.

In the months leading up to the first visit, the author became increasingly focused on “worlds within worlds” and began noticing parallels between the pond’s hidden patterns and the structures of human life within society. This led to a desire to visually unite two realms that coexist in the same place but are rarely perceived together because of their vastly different scales. To express this, the author committed to creating a tapestry-like photographic study that would “knit together” the microscopic and the human.

With help from the University of Luxembourg, the author learned to use a medical microscope and began examining drops of pond water, searching for diatoms and other tiny organisms. Wanting the human presence to be central, the author also involved local residents of Dudelange, many from Portuguese and Italian families with ties to the steel industry. Since safety rules prevented bringing people to the ponds, the author brought the pond to them—collecting water in a red mop bucket, dipping an underwater camera into it before taking portraits, and later immersing prints in the pond so microscopic life could transfer onto the paper’s surface.