Meet Austin Gill | Photographer and Stuntman

We had the good fortune of connecting with Austin Gill and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Austin, we’d love to hear what makes you happy.
What makes me happy? I have no idea. Sometimes I like that I don’t know, it allows for some spontaneity in my life, some adventure, and risk taking, constantly analyzing and searching for something new. I guess I’m not sure what happy truly means. I have this romantic vision of what I think would make me happy; the wife, the kid, and the dog, a house on a street with neighbors just like me, a stable job and a promising career. But that’s not what I know. My whole life has been a constant flow of instability. Not one of my family members works a ‘normal’ job; they are all creatives, traveling the world, freelancers working job to job to job to job. Without the consistency of friendships, relationships, a home life, or even a place of my own, I’ve found that I find happiness in different ways in different times of my life.

When asked what I want in life, my answer, it just so happens, is to be happy. What I want in order to be happy is the opportunity to explore. The thing I’m most terrified of in life is being stagnant, limiting my world to only one place, confining my experiences to only a small portion of what’s out there. Society has taught me that I need a stable job and home life in order to be happy, or at least successful but who says success stems from an income? If I succeed in exploring the beautiful culture, landscape, and mysteries of even a small percentage of this world, I will feel successful. I will never remember the things I bought, the bonuses I accumulated, or the numbers in my account, but I will never forget the gift of opportunity given to me just because I’m alive.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’ve always struggled with identity. I’ve been a stuntman since I was 8 years old, when I worked on a film called ‘Extreme Dating’, and after that, I never thought of doing anything else. My family are stuntmen and it just seemed like where I needed to be and it caused me to never truly think of what I wanted. If I wasn’t born into the film industry, what would I be doing? Where would I want to be? Only recently, have I began identifying as an artist, more specifically a photographer.

I guess it’s been hidden in plain sight all my life. I picked up a film camera when I was 16 and never put it down. I photographed everything. I always had a camera on me and I began accumulating more and more, always wanting to learn more, experiment more, and document my life. I never photographed for money, even when I was hired by people, I wouldn’t accept money, because I just wanted to shoot.

But still, I never thought of myself as an artist. I went to study photography in New York and we were asked what kind of photographer we wanted to be. Did we want to be fine artists and have our work shown in galleries, or be photographers by trade; shoot projects for money. I chose the latter because at that point, I hadn’t thought of what my art meant to me.

I’ve struggled with depression for years and photography has always been a form of therapy for me. On top of that, I also journaled heavily, constantly writing, drawing, pasting notes and ticket stubs, also documenting my life. I’ve always been so self analytical, living in my head attempting to understand every single small emotion and feeling I had, which, to be honest, is exhausting.

But as I strayed away from the ‘stuntman’ personality, one where I had to pretend, fake interest, and adjust my persona depending on who I talked to, I rediscovered myself and surrounded myself with other artists. Ones who also self-analyzed, who openly shared their weaknesses, their trauma, their difficulties in life, and I related to them. For the first time, I felt like I had something to share, something I wanted to share.

One day, I passed around my journal to all my friends, and let them have free access to it, to everything. All the awkward, embarrassing, honest, and raw entries that no one was ever meant to read. I loved the feeling of them truly knowing me, not having to hide or pretend, and just allowing myself to be all of me. It was then that I decided to create art for myself, to combine my journal entries with my photography and so I began my series titled, ‘In My Own Shoes.’

In My Own Shoes’ is a conceptual photographic series that focuses on the idea of identity and mental health. With self-portraits and narrative images, I recreated certain journal entries from the last decade; ones that I empathize with, and ones that I felt could still help me process some challenges in my life. In my journals, I found ideas of love, loss, friendship, identity, depression, anxiety, fears, and the list goes on. I believe self-analysis is crucial to mental health, always striving to be better, but there is a balance between self-destruction and self-improvement. Overly analytical can be exhausting on your mental health and this series has felt like a stepping stone to self improvement. With each new photo completed, I feel as though there is a checklist that I can tick off, and move on to another problem.

This series, my art, has become a necessary therapy for myself. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have the outlet of photography. It hasn’t been easy coming to this place, but every wall, every boundary, and every challenge has been only productive, pushing me to keep creating, using my difficulties as fuel and driving my passion even further. ‘In My Own Shoes’ will most likely never be complete. It will be an on-going, ever-changing, work that needs no validation from anyone. No validation from anyone, except myself.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Just yesterday, a friend asked me, ‘Why do I always end up in the weirdest situations when I hang out with you?’ I couldn’t have been prouder. I’ve always been intrigued in the oddities, the obscure, the places that aren’t on the thrillist page of things to do in ‘xyz’ city. Of course, I enjoy visiting the top rated restaurants, the city museums, and the best attractions of any city but when a friend comes to visit, those are the last places I want to take them. They could find all of those things with a quick ‘best things to do in Atlanta’ google search. Where’s the personality? Where’s my personality in that? I want to show my friends MY Atlanta, MY New York, My Arizona, and MY California.

Top on my list is burlesque shows, and not the sleazy stripper kind, the all-are-welcome, support-one-another, shows that are meant to be laughed and enjoyed over a couple of drinks. Still to this day, I have found nothing better than the Slipper Room in the Lower East Side, Manhattan. I highly recommend it to anyone who visits New York. Its a place that I took my parents on a night out and I can easily say, none of us will ever forget that night. Comparable to the Slipper Room here in Atlanta is the Clermont Lounge. I want my friends to be surprised when they visit me, I want them to tell their friends later about their experience in Atlanta so my goal is to almost shock them in a way.

Straying away from nudie bars, I love the outdoors. A favorite line between my friends and I is, ‘if you can see it, you can walk to it.’ This always leads us off trail, through bushes, and brambles, and you almost always end up with cuts, scrapes, bruises, and a of course, covered in dirt. I love exploring. To just walk into the woods with a camera and a few friends can be endless fun, creating, climbing, shooting, there’s nothing like it. I could easily spend a whole day driving through small towns, sifting through antique marts and eating at local diners, seeing the landscape go by as we listen to music.

But like I said, I enjoy a good meal, a good drink, and good atmosphere so I have to include some of my favorite restaurants and bars here in Atlanta. Bartaco. Nothing more needs to be said. The tacos, the tequila, the vibes, are absolutely my style. Specifically the one in Inman Park, best in town. And just off the beltline, there’s a small speakeasy behind an ice cream parlor that’s dark, moody, and filled with the smell of Aperol and the sound of jazz. It’s perfect for a late night date, and a good excuse to dress up, which is always a plus in my book.

I do find that certain ’things to do’ websites do a disservice to a city. I drives me nuts when I read one of those articles titled, ‘unique, unknown things to do’ and the first thing on the list is the Georgia Aquarium. I encourage everyone to stop a local on the street, ask them their favorite restaurant, and think no more and just go try it. Even if it doesn’t sound like your taste, that person likes it, so there must be something about it. The city has so much to offer and it’s sad when people frequent the same 6 places in rotation. Don’t live a little, live a lot.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My family is my team. We are equals and we are very much united. My cousins, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents all make a point to keep family together. I am the youngest of the ‘kids’ in my family. The order goes Carl, Cole, Katie, Cody, Kelly, Austin. Everyone’s name begins with a ‘-ka’ sound, I broke the cycle. Everyone’s role and responsibility in our family is to, as my sister says, ‘be cool human beings.’ That’s very generalized but I really connect with it. Being a ‘cool human being’ does not mean popular, it doest not mean trendy, it does not even mean likeable. It means be yourself. Be an individual. Be kind, patient, caring, understanding. Be loving. Be available. Be helpful. Be all of these things and more. Not just to your family, but your friends, your acquaintances, co-workers, strangers. It is your responsibility to make good for the Gill family name. You are an ambassador and a representative of the family so don’t do anything stupid. Have intent. Then, when the kids have kids, it will be our responsibility to raise them as we were raised, proud to be Gills.

Website: https://www.austingillphoto.com/

Instagram: austingillphoto

Other: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user44580096

Image Credits
Photos by Austin Gill. Models: Self, Charlie Cluff, Abby Luke, Cody Gill, Non Luckanachai, Florencia Villa, Nico von Wildsau