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 […]
‘DOC006 – The Ties That Bind’ is our new digital magazine. Released to coincide with our exhibition of the same name at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, from 26th Sept- 24th April 2016. Created in collaboration with acclaimed digital masterminds Start Digital, who we enjoyed working with on our first Digital Magazine, ‘The Ties […]
Our exhibition at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery – “The Ties That Bind” opens soon. To accompany the opening of the exhibition, we will be presenting our work and talking about our projects at the Portrait Gallery, on Saturday 26th September from 2-3pm. The event is free, and all 4 of us will be speaking […]
We are delighted to announce that publisher Cafe Royal Books has produced a very special, limited edition box set of work by Document Scotland’s four photographers. Timed to coincide with our exhibition entitled The Ties That Bind, which opens at the end of September at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the compendium of […]
Late in 2014, I had the good fortune to meet and photograph an artist whose reputation is becoming as big as the work he is making. Andy Scott, the sculptor who created the magnificent Kelpies which dominate the landscape near Falkirk, is also responsible for a number of other public commissions which are dotted around […]
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 […]
We are less than a month away from the launch of our forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, which opens on 26th September 2015. Curated by the gallery’s Curator of International Photography, Anne Lyden, The Ties That Bind brings together Document Scotland’s four photographers who each present projects which have been […]
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 […]
During the spring and summer of 2014, I spent several months exploring the site of the former Ravenscraig steelworks in Lanarkshire. Once Europe’s largest hot strip mill, the British Steel plant employed thousands of men – and some women – in what was commonly regarded as Scotland’s industrial heart from when it opened in 1957 […]
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 – […]
It’s always a nice way to start the day when a beautiful new publication arrives on your doorstep. What made yesterday even better was that the publication was unexpected, and that Document Scotland are featured in it. The Bigger Picture: The Work of Impressions Gallery is a clever and comprehensive retrospective of Impressions Gallery. “Since […]
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 […]
Earlier this week photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert represented Document Scotland on a panel discussion held in Edinburgh on the topic of ‘Photography in Scotland’. Organised and hosted by Ratio 7:1 photography collective, a new collective of students of photography from Napier University, and held to coincide with their ‘Dismantle’ exhibition which is currently showing, the evening was deemed to […]
We delivered four lovely boxes of prints and a hard drive of digital files to St Andrews this week and are very pleased that Document Scotland’s work has now become one of the most recent acquisitions to the St Andrews University Special Collection. Document Scotland started working with Marc Boulay and the University of St […]
To most right-thinking people, all it involves is 22 men (or women) chasing an inflated leather sphere around a grassy field in a pointless physical activity of no consequence. To the rest of us it’s an obsession: football, otherwise known as our national sport. I’ve been bewitched by the sport since my dad took me […]
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 […]
It was, we were constantly reminded in the media and elsewhere, a year like no other. Certainly, for those of us who wield a camera for a living or for enjoyment – or both – there was no shortage of subject matter on which we could focus our energies on in Scotland in 2014. From […]
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 […]
Document Scotland is thrilled to announce that Harry Benson CBE, one of the world’s leading photographers of the last sixty years, and a proud son of Clarkston, Glasgow, has agreed to be our honorary patron. Harry who lives in New York and Florida, has shot so many iconic pictures from the 20th century that it […]
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 […]
We’re delighted to announce that to accompany our ‘Common Ground’ exhibition at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, we have self-published an 84-page colour publication, and one which we can offer exclusively for sale here. Including two photo essays from each Document Scotland member, Sophie Gerrard, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Colin McPherson and Stephen McLaren, ‘Common Ground’ takes a look […]
To kick start our joining Common Ground show at Street Level Photoworks, with our friends from A Fine Beginning photo collective from Wales, we’re holding some folio review sessions on August 29th, from 2pm – 4pm. One photographer from Document Scotland will join one photographer from A Fine Beginning and together we can review your folios! […]
There’s a lot going on in DocuScot House, but we wanted to post a couple of items which our great colleagues of Impressions Gallery have kindly made and posted to promote our Beyond The Border show at Impressions, which is running at the gallery until 27th September…. For some background reading, to give the viewers of […]
This important and timely exhibition showcases groundbreaking new work from some of Wales and Scotland’s contemporary photographers. Document Scotland, formed in 2012 by Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren, are responding to the global audience looking at Scotland at this, one of the most important times in the country’s history. Formed in […]
Last weekend, on an incredibly hot and sunny day in Bradford, Document Scotland took part in a busy and successful day of portfolio reviews and talks at Impressions Gallery as part of Beyond The Border: New Contemporary Photography from Scotland. Sophie, Colin and Jeremy joined the team at Impressions to talk to a number of talented […]
Document Scotland are hitting the road next month. We are heading to the Highlands and Argyll to host the first of a series of four salon events across the country which will present the work we will be showing at our forthcoming exhibition at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow. There will be presentations in person […]
I am very pleased to announce that to co-incide with Document Scotland’s exhibition Beyond The Border currently on at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, The Photographers’ Gallery are selling a special selection of limited edition, archival, signed prints of Drawn To The Land; Women working the Scottish landscape. The selected images are available in 3 sizes and available […]
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 […]