Document Scotland have invited our recent students from Edinburgh Napier Unversity to write up some of the exhibitions they’ve been exnjoying recently. Taylor Cowe joined Document Scotland on a student placement in 2024 and is graduating this year with his excellent body of work Mortar at the Napier Degree Show.

Taylor went along to Studies In Photography at 6 William Street in Edinburgh to review their latest exhibition New Contemporaries, featuring Tayo Adekunle, Eoin Carey, Tiu Makkonen. Thank you Taylor for reviewing the show, it’s on until 7th June so there’s a few days left to catch it.

Studies in Photography’s latest exhibition, New Contemporaries, brings together the work of Eoin Carey, Tayo Adekunle and Tiu Makkonen with the underpinning theme of identity across the works, in terms of both the self and as a part of larger communities.

Eoin Carey’s FATHER is a work that presents intimate views, and accounts of fathers and their children highlighting mundane tasks and routines. This works in an attempt to move away from stereotypes surrounding the role and presentations of the father, aided by the scattered display of these images, depicts something more fleeting and nuanced. The inclusion of text from the fathers and drawings from their children in the book, continues to build community of individuals with shared experience.

In Tayo Adekunle’s works Reclamation of the Exposition and Yemoja she directly addresses colonial and racial histories and the role of photography in this. Adekunle’s use of self-portraiture and interventions into historical ethnographic photographs gives her control over narrative and presentation and brings an acknowledgement and empathy for the nameless women in the images. This control is established in the space with the scale of the louder constructed images in comparison to the smaller, deeply set historical images.

Tiu Makkonen’s Letters to Ourselves and Portraits of an LGBTI+ Generation bring together an ageing community of LGBTI+ individuals from around Scotland. The work deals in representation and collaboration, giving agency to those photographed with handwritten letters accompanying the images. The experiences and stories detailed in them bring the work into context with different generations of a community.

The collection of these works demonstrates a variety and subtlety in the presentation and representations of identity with strong underlying links to the communities and histories within which they exist.

Robin Gillanders from Studies said “We at Studies in Photography are delighted to show such excellent and diverse work from emerging photographers. We are similarly grateful to Document Scotland for their interest and delighted that they have reviewed the show”

Thanks again Taylor for this review, our most recent placement student Molly will be writing hers up soon. To see more of Eoin’s work Father take a look at the Document Scotland feature from 2020.