Family by Fall ‘07 contender Robert Gill

Young photographer Robert Gill has had a rapidly developing career as a photographer; so rapid, in fact, that he decided to leave New York last year and his job as a commercial photographer in order to fulfill what he calls, “the most important, yet vague, goal of my life: to become a conceptual artist.”

Gill calls upon creative frustration to explain his decision to desert the commercial world:

I felt like I had something more relevant and more important to say and I knew that the commercial world I was stuck in would never give me the platform to do so. By twenty-three I had already been exploited as a photojournalist in the Philippines for a missionary organization, shot a product catalogue for Urban Outfitters, and had been deemed the rookie photographer of the year in the National Horseshow Circuit. There is little room in product catalogues for a photographer’s view on life.

All by the age of 23? Wow! And he had only been equipped with a camera in high school, so now you know what I mean by rapid! And how exactly did he get here, you ask? Well…

I grew up in Pennsylvania, all of my childhood friends were Amish, I am not. When I was five I was run over by a truck my father was driving. I was diagnosed with ADD as result of the accident and was drugged through the most shaping years of my life. By the time I was in high school I was a D-C student, but one extremely intelligent/blessing of teacher saw through struggles with the educational system and gave me a camera. He had four photographs on the first roll of film I ever shot published in the local newspaper. This saved my life. Soon afterwards, I stopped taking medicine. I got B’s.

Gill is currently living down in Georgia where he attends photo history classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design and finds himself inspired by the “tender touch of André Kertész” and the “straight photography of Walker Evans.” He describes his currently body of work as based around “the pressures of young adulthood and the culturally entrenched goals my generation are striving for.”

Best of luck, Robert! And in case the rest of you haven’t heard, the Fall edition of Hey, Hot Shot! is now ON! So enter today!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 9:55 pm by Marina and is filed under Contenders, Fall '07 Hot Shots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.