Features
As the 2015 UK General Election campaign gathers pace, we are being bombarded by soundbites and overwhelmed by statistics whilst politicians appear on every television screen, newspaper and website we look at. There’s no getting away from politics, for the next couple of months, at least. So we at Document Scotland are going to add […]
Keith Ingham‘s photographs, taken from 1976 – 1979, were shot as part of a project for The People’s Palace Museum. Large parts of Glasgow’s East End, especially in Calton, were due for major demolition and it was felt the soon-to-be-disrupted community should be recorded. This series of images documents life not only in the East […]
EMPTY SHOP, by Kenneth Gray Starting in July 2014, the Empty Shop series came about more by chance than planning. Whilst walking my dog around Edinburgh, with a camera ever-ready, I started to see shops which had lain empty for some time, stripped of fittings and ready for let or sale. Desolate and unused and […]
24 Bobbins to BallalanThe Tweed Mills of the Outer Hebrides, by Robin Mitchell. In the autumn of 2009 I was entering my final year of study for a degree in Documentary Photography at Newport in South Wales. Not long before that I had made my first visit to the Outer Hebrides and I was looking […]
At a recent Document Scotland salon, at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, we invited Sarah Amy Fishlock, editor and publisher of ‘GooseFlesh’ photography ‘zine, to show some of her recent photography from her project ‘Amye And Ahren’ documenting the daily life of a boy living with autism. Sarah kindly lets us reproduce the work here also. Sarah is […]
Published some years ago by the World Jewish Congress, Jewish Communities of the World is a slim anthology providing a snapshot of the history of Jewish people in each country of the world at the end of the 20th century. In dates and numbers, it lists how many Jews are living in their respective countries and […]
Over the last few months here at Document Scotland we have been pretty busy, however, we always make time to see new work. Here we take a look at some of the work by graduates from Edinburgh Napier University 2014 which was on show earlier this year in their degree show and also at Free […]
We interviewed Marc Wilson and featured his impressive project ‘The Last Stand‘ on the Document Scotland site a while ago. His project beautifully documents some of the physical remnants of the Second World War on the coastlines of the British Isles and northern Europe. When we first spoke to Marc, he had already travelled to […]
Three cheers for the Commonwealth Games. The metal stick aka “the Queen’s Baton” which she kindly loaned-out for a series of global jogs has traversed the old pink section of the global atlas and has now entered Glaswegian orbit after a dash across Scotia’s hills, glens and shopping centres. I remember the 1974 Games in […]
Luke Brown sent us this series of images ‘Time And Tide Wait For No Man’, a look at the outdoor swimming pool areas of the Edwardian and Victorian eras. It isn’t a subject matter we’d seen covered before, and knowing nothing of Scottish outdoor pools we find it of interest and Luke has graciously shared […]
It was with pleasure that I followed a link on Twitter today, that great oracle, and found out news that a book of Scottish photography is about to be reprinted. Always joyous news here in Document Scotland. The book in question is Stone Built by Gunnie Moberg, so with kind permission of the Gunnie Moberg […]
If not the quite centre of the universe, Stirling felt like the place to be in Scotland this weekend. On Friday evening, Pipefest kicked three days of festivities, with around 1600 pipers and other musicians from around the world marching from the castle through the city’s streets. The following day, Bannockburn Live competed for attention […]
“Andrew Cawley sent us his Wrestlers portfolio as a submission, and in an instant we were in agreement to run it. We haven’t seen such portraits of Scots wrestlers in recent times, if at all, and barely know how the pro-wrestling scene works and operates. That is how Andrew began, seeing a poster, wanting to […]
Jim Yorkston’s exhibition opened at the Filmhouse last night. We’ve been on the lookout for an opportunity to feature Jim’s work on the Document Scotland blog so we had a chat with him about this latest work ‘Haneen lil watten’ – meaning ‘A Yearning for my Homeland.’ DS – What’s this new work about and […]
Yes and No: the year 2014 saw Scotland vote in a referendum to decide whether the country should become an independent nation. Document Scotland’s Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert spent much of the time leading up to the poll meeting and photographing people on both sides of the political divide. “Following on from the series of photographs I […]
‘My Addiction, My Photographs’, by Graham MacIndoe Over the past few years Scottish-born photographer Graham MacIndoe has been on what you could call a ‘character building’ trip. From the highs of a successful career in advertising photography to the highs of a serious drug addiction, and the inevitable descent into a world he never thought […]
On September 18th, 2014 the electorate of Scotland went the polls to answer, with a simple or some may believe not-so-simple Yes or No, the question: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ In the run-up to the vote, Document Scotland photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert went on the campaign trail and found it was more a case […]
An exhibition of black and white photographs called ‘Six Percent’ is currently showing at the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness. The work, by Perth based documentary photographer Graham Miller, was carried our over two years in conjunction with Down’s Syndrome Scotland who then funded a print run of the book and the framed images which […]
Over here at Document Scotland we enjoy the work of Iain Sarjeant, who is based up north, a tad north of Inverness. But Iain’s location doesn’t stop him from wandering the streets of Scotland capturing his quietly observed moments. We’ve previously run some of Iain’s work from his ‘Out of the Ordinary’ project, but here […]
Alan McCredie, an Edinburgh-based photographer, had the genesis of a great project-idea in October 2012. Realising that the Independence referendum was exactly 100 weeks in the future, he decided he would start “100 Weeks of Scotland”, a photographic endeavour to record events and scenes from all over Scotland in the lead up to the referendum. […]
I remember where I was twenty three years ago, on Sunday, February 11th 1990. I remember it clearly. I was sitting in a little blue Ford Fiesta car, for which I can still remember the registration number, my first car. I was stopped at traffic lights in Charing Cross, Glasgow, and the radio was on. […]
At a recent photography show opening in Street Level Gallery, Glasgow, I bumped into Donna Maria Kelly and she told me of her work photographing, as personal mementos, her father’s belongings in the hours after he had died. It was an interesting story and encouraging to hear that Donna, a recent photography course graduate, had […]
Ian Paterson and John Maher are two photographers who found themselves covering the same subject matter in the Hebrides and decided it would be best to join forces and present their work as a joint exhibition and potential book. Document Scotland, a great believer in photographers finding common cause and pooling resources, wanted to find […]
Craig Buchan has been photographing, the Sisters of the Poor Clare Order, in Humbie, near Edinburgh. The work constitutes a photo exhibition starting at the recently opened Trigg Gallery in Dundas Street, Edinburgh, on August 15th. Gallery is open Monday to Friday 8.30am – 18.30pm and Saturday 8.30am to 13.30pm. Commitment by Craig Buchan. “Sisters Dominique […]
Starting a new series is always a tentative process: The fulfilment of an idea that may have been gathering momentum in a closet somewhere in a corner of your mind. Will a story translate from idea form to visual reality? Will I waste my time working on something that may lead to nothing? The night […]
Spring 2013 was one of the coldest on record – it almost never really came. Farmers all over Scotland were concerned and anxious that by mid April, there was still no sign of grass, that’s pretty much unheard of. 15 foot snow drifts on Arran over Easter and -5 degrees recorded in Fort William added […]
“I’m are very pleased to announce that today Cafe Royal Books, run and published by Craig Atkinson, have published a little limited edition (of 150) ‘zine book of my Common Riding photographs. All the images were shot in 2000, in the Scottish Borders, and 14 of them form the 28page black and white ‘zine. All […]
It had been a long day. I had started early, going straight to Home-Start Levenmouth offices and interviewing all who worked there. It was just before Christmas and everyone was running around trying to organise the bags of presents which had been donated. Never ending lists filled with children’s names were being checked off and […]
As our inaugural Document Scotland exhibition, “Seeing Ourselves”, opens this week in Glenrothes, we are featuring a blog each week for the duration of the exhibition from all contributing photographers. The feature is called, “Why I Took this Picture”, and needs no further explanation. First-up, Stephen McLaren, on his photograph, “Dolly”. “When the weather disappoints […]
On a brilliantly bright, icy cold, winter Sunday afternoon recently I caught up with Giulietta Verdon Roe over coffee and cake. I knew that Giulietta had made several visits to the remote Scottish island of North Ronaldsay over a number of years to create a documentary photographic project of the population and character of the […]
“A couple of months ago Document Scotland were invited by Stephen Mather, at the City of Glasgow College, to give a talk on documentary photography, and also to set a brief for the student’s documentary photography module on which they were about to embark. We chose the title, or subject, of ‘Self’ as the brief, […]
In 2013, Document Scotland were approached by Gemma Ovens, at the time a student at the City of Glasgow College, about showing her photographic work on the Skeklers, and skekling tradition from the Shetland Isles, and we felt both that the images Gemma had sent over were so interesting, so strange looking, and also that […]
“”Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel’s as others see us!” In asking God to give us the ability to see ourselves the way we appear to others, Robert Burns was musing on the personality and character traits that go into making us the individuals we are. But the quote might […]
It is with great pleasure that Document Scotland can today showcase the work by Glyn Satterley, from his latest book ‘Going To The Hill, Life On Scottish Sporting Estates’. This is the tenth book by Glyn, a renowned freelancer whose work has been widely exhibited and published in magazines. He has spent many years documenting […]
Twenty years ago this weekend, on 5th January 1993, the Lerwick coastguard were advised that the Liberian-registered oil tanker, the MV Braer, carrying 85,000 tonnes of crude oil, was drifting without power in a storm 10 miles off of Sumburgh Head, in the Shetland Isles. The vessel eventually settled on rocks, leaking her cargo of […]
Award-winning social documentary photographer Larry Herman, originally from New York, immigrated to the UK during the Vietnam War. He is currently working on two independent projects: Waged London, about those people who generally sell their labour by the hour and he has just begun a project in Cuba about the working lives of people there. […]
The Human Endeavour Collective will be exhibiting for the third time as part of the Brighton Photo Fringe, having exhibited in 2008 and 2010 with the backing of the Arts Council England. Acting as an evolving platform for contemporary photographic practice, Human Endeavour aims to explore and reflect the sociological and political impacts of poverty […]
The mesmerising Glasgow landscapes which Martin Hunter has shot over the last decade show us a city unrecognisable from the brochures promoting the “Style Mile” or the Merchant City. In this series, Martin gone off-road, he has lugged his large-format Linhof camera around the winds of the River Kelvin and over the eastend’s “spare” ground. […]
Scottish photographer Glyn Satterley has a new book, ‘Going To The Hill, Life On The Scottish Sporting Estates’, out tomorrow. Here at Document Scotland we eagerly look forward to seeing it. The publisher describes Glyn’s new book as “a celebration of Scotland’s rich sporting heritage by internationally acclaimed photographer Glyn Satterley. This is the sequel to […]
In 1955 American photographer Robert Frank received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. Only 83 of those images were […]