Stephen Gill loves the beauty of the banal. For instance, he has produced a series on shopping carts, and photographed the back side of advertising billboards. For RUSSIAN WOMEN SMOKERS (2002) he focused on discarded Russian cigarette butts. We will never know who smoked these cigarettes; only the lipstick on the filter betrays that they were smoked by women. These vestiges stimulated Gill's imagination, something which he hopes to accomplish with the viewer too with this series. According to Gill, 'Cigarette butts tell you little, but they start a thought process that may possibly bring you out to a face rather than an object.'

Stephen Gill (Great Britain, b. 1971) has been photographing since he was a boy. In the 1990s he worked for some years as an assistant with the British branch of Magnum, and since 1997 has been a freelance photographer.