The work of Scottish photographer Keith Lloyd Davenport first came to our attention last year when Document Scotland held a portfolio review session in Cardiff at the launch of our Common Ground exhibition at the city’s Millennium Centre. It’s fair to say that tackling the subject of fishermen as a documentary photographer offers both abundant […]
GRAHAM MACINDOE: COMING CLEAN8 April – 5 November 2017Scottish National Portrait Gallery1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JDAdmission free#GrahamMacIndoe Powerful self-portraits depicting drug addiction of acclaimed Scottish photographer to be shown by National Galleries of Scotland A compelling and powerful series of photographs that document an acclaimed Scottish photographer’s devastating descent into drug addiction are to […]
Article by Stephen McLaren By returning to photography as both a craft and a career after an enforced period of absence due to illness, Margaret Mitchell reminds us that personal visions remain across decades.
30th July 2016 “ It tests you physically, mentally and emotionally. Every single corner of your psyche gets seriously rinsed out here……….” (Title image: Starlings On Fire, © Peter Iain Campbell, all rights reserved.) SEARCHING FOR THE ANTITHESIS / A TANGLED WEB OF PIPING 11th November 2013 – 12th August 2014 Being strapped to a seat […]
We’re delighted to read that Chris Leslie‘s Disappearing Glasgow project is getting another outing, this time as a multimedia exhibition at Glasgow Lighthouse space. If you missed Chris’s recent Glasgow School of Art show, then you should hurry along to see this arrangement of the works… Exhibition info: Photographer and filmmaker Chris Leslie is widely […]
Frank McElhinney’s work first came to our attention in 2014 when he won first place at that year’s Jill Todd Award for his intriguing, unique aerial photographs. Since then this prolific artist has gone from strength to strength, creating several bodies of work focussing on Scotland’s landscape and how it relates to our country’s past, both […]
Scotland’s pioneering role in the development of photography in the 19th century is being celebrated in a new display at the National Library of Scotland. The exhibition runs until March 26th, and entry is free. It features one of the first ever books to be illustrated with photographs, William Henry Fox Talbot’s Sun Pictures in […]
In Scotland’s Season of Photography, the Scottish Fisheries Museum is delighted to be hosting a striking exhibition of black and white images shot by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert aboard the seine net fishing boats, Mairead and Argosy, in the North Sea in the 1990’s. These images capture the reality of the life at sea for the fishermen […]
It would be easy to label Larry Herman’s work as ‘old school’. His photography is indeed imbued with an aesthetic sense which resonates the past. Grainy, monochrome images which depict life at a time when Scotland’s Industrial Age was coming to an end and the new service economy and its illegitimate offspring, unemployment and job […]
The work of Jo Spence, British photographer, educator and writer (1934 – 1992) is the focus for Stills Gallery’s summer exhibition. Curated by Ben Harman, the exhibition presents a powerful and important collection of Jo Spence’s work from her documentary work and collaborative projects to her self exploratory portraiture. From Stills exhibition introduction: ‘Typically working […]
A few friends of Document Scotland are having a 2-venue show in the coming weeks called Peripheral Histories. See below for all the important info and hope to see you at one of the two venues for this Street Level Photoworks supported show! We’re told there is different work in each venue, so make sure to […]
Jeremy’s image from the Glasgow shipyards, taken in 1992 and currently featured in the exhibition Govan/Gdansk at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow was featured in the Guardian this week with an interview by Ben Beaumont Thomas. You can read the interview here: “In the 1990s I lived in Govan, on the south side of Glasgow, […]
We’re pleased to hear that Glasgow-born photojournalist Harry Benson CBE, and Honorary Patron of Document Scotland, is having an exhibition at the Scottish Parliament later this year. The press release from Holyrood, reproduced below, tells all… An exhibition featuring the work of one of the world’s most renowned photographers, Harry Benson CBE, is to go on display […]
Cliftonhill is one of the most evocative grounds in Scottish football, yet one suspects hardly anyone in Scotland could describe what it looks like or even – given Albion Rovers’ name – where it is. Photographer Iain McLean has spent many years visiting the ground as a fan and a photographer. His project, entitled More […]
To mark today’s final printed edition of the Independent, Document Scotland’s Colin McPherson talks about his contribution to the newspaper and the motivation behind the publication of a book of his photographs taken on assignment for, or published by, the paper. Document Scotland (DS): Today, 26th March, the last edition of the Independent will hit […]
Perth-based photographer Graham Miller‘s lastest body of work, ‘Autism: Hearts of Angels’, will be exhibited at The Birnam Institute, Dunkeld, in March. The exhibition runs from Wednesday 2nd of March to Thursday March 31st with the official opening reception March 6th from 2pm to 4pm, at The Birnam Institute, Station Road, Birnam, Dunkeld, PH8 0DS. Background […]
JOSEPH McKenzie had a secret. For the last 35 years of his life, the man known as “the father of modern Scottish photography” stopped exhibiting his pictures, withdrawing from public life. In the eyes of the world, he had retired, retreated to his home in Tayport, on Scotland’s east coast, with its long view over […]
At a recent Street Level Photoworks ‘In Focus’ event, looking at book publishing, which we attended, we had the pleasure of listening to Lucie Rachel discuss her book-in-progress, ‘Mother Father’, a story documenting the relationship of her parents. Impressed with the work, and Lucie’s approach, we asked if we could showcase it here. Lucie kindly […]
*** New just in! There’s going to be a second edition of the book printed. Another 150 are being printed to meet demands! More news soon, once they’re available *** Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s fourth Café Royal Book was released last Thursday, and very nicely sold out overnight! Thank you everyone for your interest and support. ‘Klondykers in […]
I’m very pleased to let you know that the black and white images I took of Nelson Mandela, in Glasgow in 1993, when he came to here to receive the Freedom of the City (and which I’ve written about previously), have been published as a little book by the industrious Craig Atkinson at Café Royal Books. On […]
Nick Hedges’ photographs for Shelter 1969-72 In 1968, Shelter employed Nick Hedges to document the oppressive and abject living conditions being experienced in poor quality housing in the UK. We commissioned the work in an effort to raise consciousness about the extent of unfit living conditions and to illustrate, in human terms, what the real […]
To coincide with our new exhibition, ‘The Ties That Bind‘, on now at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until April 2016, Jeremy has published a book of his work, ‘Unsullied And Untarnished’, portraying the Common Riding festivals of the Scottish Borders. The same work forms Jeremy’s contribution to our SNPG show. ‘Unsullied And Untarnished’ is photographic portrait […]
Document Scotland photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert talks about his work covering fishing in the North Sea in the 1990s and his adventures on the stormy-tossed waters off the east coast. “Back in the day I’d had an assignment from a Scottish newspaper to go out on a fishing boat which was taking part in a fisherman’s […]
A Stroll Through The Gorbals To walk in the Gorbals area of Glasgow is to walk through a district of this city immortalised in iconic photographs, a district whose name is known far and wide, for better or for worse, and whose history has been captured in silver by some of the great photojournalists of […]
The village of New Lanark, nestled in the sprawling Clyde Valley on the Falls of the Clyde became world renown in the 19th century as one of the earliest examples of a socialist utopian community. Built as a cotton mill by the industrialist David Dale in 1846, here workers conditions were revolutionised with the implementation […]
We recently caught up a a Street Level Photoworks show opening with photographer Chris Leslie, who has been working hard these past three years photographing and documenting Glasgow’s East End and the transformation underway there. Chris has been working with 2 other artists and has recently published Nothing Is Lost, a box set of books. […]
Gregor Schmatz has recently finished a BA Photography at Edinburgh Napier University. Document Scotland caught up with him and had a chat about his ongoing degree show project about Methil in Fife, Scotland. DS: Tell us a little about yourself Gregor, and why you decided to make this particular project. GS: I was born in […]
Journalist and editor Alan Taylor has kindly given us permission to republish his appreciation of photographer Joseph McKenzie who recently passed away, aged 86. This article first ran in The National, on July 20th 2015. (See also The Herald obituary of Jospeh McKenzie.) Belated praise for Joseph McKenzie – a neglected pioneer of Scottish photography, by […]
We were very excited to hear of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s latest photography acquisition, great to hear that nine images from South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, by Paul Strand have been acquired for the nations’s photography collection. Great news indeed. Below, you can read about the acquisition and see the images, but we recommend […]
In the last six months I have been shooting a project which examines Scotland’s links with the slave-based sugar economy of Jamaica in the 18th and 19th Century. I visited Jamaica in early Spring and shot photographs of properties which were owned Scottish plantation-owners owned and which grew sugar-cane using the forced labour of African […]
An email slipped into our Document Scotland inboxes recently which we felt would be good to share with everyone, telling us of a new book out on Thomas Annan, Scottish documentary photographer. “…latest Open Access book, Thomas Annan of Glasgow: Pioneer of the Documentary Photograph by Lionel Gossman, a study of nineteenth-century photography, urban life, and Scotland – […]
We caught up recently with Donnie MacLean, whose work we have featured previously, to see what he has been up to on the streets and we were pleased to hear that he’s just about to launch new work in a new photography show along with a book, ‘A Glasgow Kiss’. Below we share some of […]
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 […]